“... their own independent state has had the effect of highlighting the scale of the obstacles to their self-determination. Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi government are now united as never before and in a position to enforce a blockade on the KRG; there is a limit to what the Kurds can do by way of retaliation. ‘The Kurdish leadership in Iraq doesn’t really have ...”

“... Chandler and Harold Q. Masur’. Manhattan Beach is itself a crime story, and, to its credit, a self-reflexive one. The question of what happened to Eddie Kerrigan drives the plot, leading Anna into the underworlds her father inhabited as a union boss’s lackey, and later as Dexter Styles’s ‘ombudsman’. When Anna first runs into Dexter, at one of his ...”

“... means Covid-free, ‘red’ means immediate hospitalisation, ‘yellow’ means self-quarantine at home) was when I went to see Tenet at the cinema. I’d managed to dodge using this code for a long time, even when visiting hospitals (ID required) or checking in to hotels (ID and facial scan required). At the cinema, the seats around me were ...”

“... a tank firing fifty quid notes over the lawn’, as Dein put it. A year later, José Mourinho, the self-described ‘Special One’, rocked up from Portugal. In 2008, Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group came for Manchester City. Meanwhile Ferguson kept on winning and winning until he retired. Leicester, somehow, won the Premier League in ...”

“... both mother and child by the child’s removal shortly after birth has long been a prompt to human self-scrutiny. Shakespeare’s Henry VI compares his inability to come to the aid of the Duke of Gloucester to the plight of a cow whose calf has been taken away from her at market. But it isn’t all helplessness. Arnold’s lyricism vividly captures in ...”

“... Lakers, he published a book called The Winner Within, which included a chapter that warned against self-serving leadership titled ‘The Disease of Me’. But the real lesson he learned from coaching the Lakers is that you should always be the most important person in the room.This is the guy the Knicks hired as head coach, and what he instituted was the ...”

“... of the menopausal woman. Removed from reproductive use value, her ‘organs become purely self-referential. They have no further potential for family or spectacle or state: they’re outside every economy,’ directed towards ‘convivial and autonomous pleasure only’. The menopausal woman ‘neither begets nor works, but drifts’.For ...”

“... The thinness of detail is made to confirm rather than weaken the authority of a rudimentary self-portrait.Bevel takes pride in his talent for anticipating the market, though he plays down his reputation, based on his ability to ride the storm in times of crisis, as a sort of Wall Street clairvoyant. There would come a point on days of heavy trading when ...”

“... as it is supposed to, but only another ‘I’, not so much the truth beneath the travelling self as the other half of a seriously split story.Elsewhere, even when the ‘I’, still vaguely maritime, is openly sorry for itself – ‘My sad heart slobbers at the poop’ – something else is going on. The form of ‘The Tortured Heart’ requires some ...”

“... friend, pour forth,’ and ‘incessantly sang it to a special tune’. His uneducated self sometimes appeared to him in dreams the way a dead bride appears to others. He called it good and beautiful. Possibly it looked like her, pale, 21 years old and knowing nothing of the world, peering timidly into the window of Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black ...”

“... lives for an audience) or a Paladin (fighting for your idea of the good, and more than a little self-righteous)? You can apply TTRPG terms and models to classic stories too. In the week when Remodel and her friends shut down the coal plant, I taught a class on King Lear. Halfway through we realised that the play, too, could be read as a TTRPG: each major ...”

“... and that Ferdinand Sr founded the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As well as these self-serving lies, conspiracy theories abounded. It was said that the CIA, the Vatican and Filipino oligarchs collaborated to oust the family from power. Millenarian fantasies, too, went viral. One claimed that Marcos Sr was bequeathed tons of gold by a secretive ...”

“... they must have done so with few illusions. They knew their farewells might be permanent. Self-sacrifice and penance characterised the ladies no less than their lords. It is small wonder that a new genre of crusader songs, chansons de départie, voiced the anxiety of parting and the heartbreak of absence. Henceforth the body must live without its ...”

“... being bought out? All the Hattersley men are in their different ways repulsive: the strong are self-righteous bullies, the less than strong are dishonest, hen-pecked and ultimately wholly seedy men. The resourceful Hattersley women come out much better, and I fancy that the novelist may have had his view of things from some grandmother, or aunt. The story ...”

“... The Wind in the Willows is a masterpiece because it really does create a new world, a serious self-contained place, whereas Pooh and Christopher Robin and Milne’s version of Toad are seen and manipulated by the grown-ups. The real Christopher Robin, known to his father as ‘Billy Moon’, had to take the role of the child obliging his parent by always ...”