“... view to challenging his account. Poor Law officials and charitable workers delivered themselves of self-justification and soul-searching in equal measure, while their clients in turn argued about Greenwood’s claims. A few of his characters – the old inmate known as ‘Daddy’ who monitored the baths and assigned sleeping places, and the young and depraved ...”

“... In February, the North Korean government announced that it had ‘manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration’s ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle’ the DPRK. This could be a bluff, but the information obtained by the IAEA inspectors before they were expelled suggests that Pyongyang has all the ...”

“... as the other story was overloaded with the fish. The old-fashioned effect of this newfangled self-exposure is a rather unexpected simplicity. The wasps’ nest is … what? The surgeon’s now broken family? His life? His wife? Liberated from soft implication, it brazenly exceeds these questions rather as the Lone Survivor also flies away, and we are ...”

“... if you have enemies; the new psychology works only if you believe the enemy is your (disowned) self. Treating the shell-shocked, the wounded and vulnerable and mad, as we treat ourselves is relatively easy (though for many people virtually impossible); the really tall order – at once nonsensical, and yet with a certain logic to it – is to live as ...”

“... The great Western empires, which depended on the consent of the governed, faced demands for self-government. Yet without the war, the changes might have taken different, less violent directions. European society would not have been brutalised by four years of slaughter and hatred. Russia might well have avoided Bolshevism. When the Soviet Union finally ...”

“... impersonal. Rodger’s underlying purpose in this trilogy is to make clear that there can be no self-contained organisational history of the Royal Navy, and that naval affairs must be reinserted into a broad-ranging history of Britain as a whole. In keeping with this, he shows that command of the oceans was more the product of changes on land than at ...”

“... and Africa, the two poles represented by his father and his mother. This was a typically inflated self-image. The reality is that like many Afrikaner families in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, the Van der Post household was torn between loyalty to the Volk and a powerful attraction to metropolitan British culture. Born in 1906, the 11th of 13 ...”

“... her treatment of relationships. In the contemporary novel, sex is not often a cheerful, mutely self-sufficient act but rather a prelude to lots of difficult emotion, complicated misunderstandings and dark and brooding thoughts. In Gordimer’s novels, when sex arrives, and more particularly when men arrive, everything suddenly becomes simple (there may be ...”

“... in which Carson apologises (entirely unnecessarily) for the fact that ‘there is too much self in my writing,’ assuring us: ‘I do not want to be a windowless monad … I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgments – but I go blind ...”

“... selection during an ancient smallpox epidemic; but it’s enough to puncture the vain notion, as self-regarding as the belief that mankind is indestructible, that a disease by itself could end our reign on earth. Mankind’s relationship with viruses in the past few hundred years has followed parallel tracks: exterminate and propagate. Caroline, Princess of ...”

“... connected with his singularly centreless personality: ‘his fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait,’ and readers ‘who have not swallowed the critical dogma that tries to exclude authors from their works’ should find the life-story illuminating. Which it is. Green’s Modernist textual density and his authorial absenteeism are here ...”

“... from it.’ Craig, historian though he is, is hard put to find much of interest here. Fontane’s self-reinventions were far from complete. In 1870, shortly after the publication of his third Wanderings volume, he became theatre critic for the Vossische Zeitung, a post he held for twenty years. Craig’s chapter on Fontane’s theatre writing is probably the ...”

“... in The Devil’s Larder – there are, after all, 64 squares on a chessboard. Such compositional self-consciousness would certainly suit Crace’s constitution of mind. The various parts in his books always add up correctly. Which is no surprise, since each of his novels asks essentially the same question: given a particular set of circumstances, what ...”

“... the rank of gentleman to stay in their stations. Admittedly they are sometimes very nice, but ‘self-motivated’. ‘All they want is less work and more money. They have no decent regard for the truth. They are spoilt and rotten. I hope unemployment leaps to astronomical proportions, and that they will be humiliated and come begging cap in hand for ...”

“... from climbing mountains would over-tax the Parliamentary draftsmen. Meanwhile England’s self-exiled pulmonaires were multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned Hotel, Discountenanced by God and ...”