“... ones. Yet little more than a century ago, this literature was unknown. In 1872, George Smith, a self-taught scholar, found an extract from it on a clay tablet newly arrived in the British Museum. What he saw there made him exclaim that he was the first man to read these words for two thousand years. Then he started rushing around the room, removing his ...”

“... landholdings: even in a good year, some 75 per cent of the population are less than 25 per cent self-sufficient in the main food crop, maize. The statistics are miserable. In 2001, the UNDP Human Development Index placed Malawi at number 151 out of 162 countries (those ranked lower were all experiencing, or had recently experienced, a state of war). Life ...”

“... in London in January this year, that ‘we share their values’ and ‘it is massively in our self-interest to remain close allies.’ It might even be wise to strive to ‘remain the closest ally of the US, and influence them to continue broadening their agenda’. But Blair seems to have gone further: he insists on being the closest ally not only of the ...”

“... variety of socio-economic modernisation: industrialisation, the arrival of the railways, municipal self-government, poverty, class conflict and, above all, huge population growth. German unification in 1871 did not change Breslau’s status – Silesia remained within Prussia, the largest federal state – but it did bring to the city national political ...”

“... Lhuyd, whose work in Celtic philology would in the long run help to clear away the lumber of self-serving ethnic origin myths. The omission of Ireland, however, is more serious. The two-way links between Presbyterianism in the North of Ireland and its principal seminary, the University of Glasgow, contributed variously to the shaping of Scottish moral ...”

“... expertise To which they gave their best Desires and energies. Such oily handed zest Bypassed the self like love. But the factory, and the soul-destroying drudgery of assembly line work, was the fate of most. Autopia doesn’t adequately address this, either. There is a report from the assembly line, but it’s written by a student of technology, Dirk ...”

“... about. MR MORTIMER: Dear lady, look at yourself. The knitting bag, the shapeless cardigan, the self-effacing attention to your employer’s every whim. Like the horse trough and the drinking fountain, you are a piece of social history. You are that thing of the past – the companion. MISS PLUNKETT: The companion! The companion? I am not the companion. Mrs ...”

“... here as an ‘obsession’. Certainly, claims such as that made by the Vice-President of the self-styled Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, Kwame Afo – to the amount of $4.1 trillion – are unlikely to bear fruit, but it is hardly their scale that makes ‘reparation politically inconceivable’ or places it ‘in a political ...”

“... fixated on the internalised hermeneutics of the academic industry, or conveying a cloying sense of self-congratulation for the author’s own ‘understanding’ of the master. The Years of Bloom evades this danger: the harbour of Trieste offers a new perspective on the life which, of all artist’s lives, seems in a real sense ...”

“... The (now published) notes evoke dramatic narratives of captures (Nabokov was tirelessly self-referential in such matters), the ravishing detail and the velvety realism of the imagined plates, fantasised as ‘arranged in series as done in the glass-topped trays of cabinets’. It was to have been a whole museum in a single book.I think he has a ...”

“... this, that Zionism offered the only solution to this predicament but, partly because of a lack of self-understanding and partly because of non-Jewish hostility or unconcern, was unable to prevent the ultimate disaster. Anti-semitism, central to this interpretation, appears simply as a given, a diabolus ex machina that requires no explanation: ‘It can be no ...”

“... Kath smokes defiantly while she breastfeeds, and they read (in a nicely understated twist of self-reference) short stories by Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence. Sonje has lost her job at the library because she’s suspected of ‘Communism’. There is an honourable tradition in English language fiction – in women’s fiction particularly – of ...”

“... had two consequences: it made support for the government almost a patriotic duty, and Thatcher’s self-estimation and confidence were enormously increased. Although Campbell argues that in the long term the war represented an almost insane misdirection of priorities, Thatcher emerges from his account rather well. However much her government was responsible ...”

“... own autobiography, Passages in a Wandering Life, but there is far more feverish guilt and self-contradiction in his life than the term ‘wandering’ suggests. The narrative of this life is in no sense straightforward. It has lost that classic linear imperative that characterised the religious quest of Pilgrim’s Progress. What Matthew Arnold ...”

“... political promises. His TV stations offer the model of a ‘normal’ family, acquisitive and self-interested, ‘surrounded by a multiplicity of commodities . . . tolerantly Catholic, vaguely inclined towards gender equality but with mothers still playing a central role as providers of services’. Ginsborg links public exposure to Berlusconi’s ...”