“... possession of the province and its oilfields is vital to the Kurds if they are to get close to self-determination. Under the new constitution, the fate of Kirkuk will be decided by 31 December 2007. If Kirkuk joins the Kurdish region, the Kurds will have first rights to new oil discoveries. Saddam had not only denied them a share in oil revenues: any Kurd ...”

“... Olympia 52, Dimanche à Pékin, Les Statues meurent aussi and Lettre de Sibérie – were self-reflexive and had political undertones. It was Bazin who credited Marker with the invention of the essay-film, in which, he suggested, meanings and associations are produced not so much in the way that shots are stitched together as through the relationship ...”

“... and shaped’ by the pressures of their milieu; their careers ‘lose the linear and self-propelled trajectory assumed by biography’, and as only a handful can ‘impose themselves sufficiently and for long enough to affect the course and character of a political system, so only a few deserve more biographical attention than can be supplied by ...”

“... as jacket copy, though Empson once said it was ‘hopelessly bad’. It is worth attending to his self-judgments; he is often hard on his own work, but if he thought it deserved praise he gave it unstintedly and perceptively, as when he celebrated The Structure of Complex Words as his masterpiece. His condemnation of ‘Let it go’ seems to have been caused ...”

“... of being a bit wet. He doesn’t drone on about how empty life is among the smart set in a bitter, self-lacerating way; he uses his novels to search for alternatives, even if he never finds any that stand up. The politics of Generation X, for example, were amazingly silly and narcissistic. The idea was that life was uniquely hard for middle-class Americans ...”

“... Diaries presents Yeltsin’s view of this political double miracle. The book is an exercise in self-justification, but provides much revealing information along the way. Yeltsin is fairly candid about the factors which changed his fortunes in the first half of 1996. Early in the year he met with six of the oligarchs at their initiative. ‘We don’t have ...”

“... her death, was filled with bits of good china and old furniture, quite innocent of Formica. Being self-taught had made her cooking more original – she found out about food from first principles by following her own tastes – but it also gave the whole notion of cooking some piquancy. She came to it as freshly as William Morris did to weaving, and with some ...”

“... 97 per cent of our genome is ‘genetic junk’, a palimpsest of useless DNA from ancient viruses, self-replicating remnants of genes no longer functional, and ‘jumping genes’ that spread regardless of the welfare of their carriers. As Ridley observes, ‘our genomes badly need worming.’ There are further intriguing lessons about genetic conflict ...”

“... of being nothing more than an exhibition of ‘common sense’ or political correctness or elegant self-righteousness. By showing how difficult it is to argue well about equality – how dense the arguments have to be, how convoluted the examples – Dworkin succeeds in removing this most prominent value from that parade of amateurs. He explodes the platitudes ...”

“... hand, why would one expect the world’s most popular sport to solve the difficult problem of self-governance when small groups of unelected men handle enormous sums of money knowing they will be forgiven any amount of theft and chicanery if their teams win? We know that boxing and horse-racing are often mafia-run, and that cricket is thoroughly ...”

“... executions, in the staged mutilation of criminals and the occasional sight of (or talk about) self-flagellants, and most especially in ubiquitous images of the bleeding Jesus Christ and martyred saints, as intoned in prayers or seen in the great splash of religious art. (The gladiatorial combats and staged hunts that ancient Rome adopted from the ...”

“... itself has bequeathed to them.’ Ackroyd’s London is constantly heading towards some kind of self-actualisation, from the establishment of the first London mint in the third century AD (‘testifying once again to the city’s true nature’) to the current success of the City’s foreign exchange markets (which shows London ‘fulfilling its historical ...”

“... to immigrants and prospective immigrants, and with what that reception shows about American self-perceptions and national identity. The discourse of American immigration serves him as a kind of proxy for a larger discourse about the American national character. In both the early and late 20th-century periods, King tells us, immigrants from unfamiliar ...”

“... and descriptions of islands. Since the Odyssey, islands have been the symbol and substance of ‘a self-contained world’, a function since taken over by the planets of science fiction. Very gradually the globe filled up with land masses; Cosgrove describes how the polar regions were mapped only in the latter half of the 20th century. Alongside the daring ...”

“... genres of fantasy and children’s literature, in Lord of the Rings or Narnia – has a certain self-sufficient charm. We are given, in Gulliverian style, an entertaining little parody of theological dispute and heresy, as the blemmyae, the headless beings with eyes in their chests, debate the nature of the Incarnation. We are supposed to be thinking that ...”