“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an adult. Terah had been an even-handed father; the death of his wife sees him grow irascible and self-absorbed. Abram needs a wife, Terah hopes for grandchildren and he has few scruples about forcing Sarai into marriage: ‘you are different from my other children, apart from them, born from another womb.’ The offhand comment divides them – Sarai feels ...”

“... firms owning over 80 per cent of the market – did most of the damage to itself. The greatest self-inflicted wound came, as such things often do, in the form of a huge opportunity: the compact disc. The new medium was, from the cartel’s point of view, superbly expensive. At first this was because the technology was new and tricky; later, it was simply ...”

“... strikingly idiosyncratic, tirelessly careful for his people, but also for himself, even a little self-pitying. All the voices of Morebath are his voice. So this is the record of a personal tragedy. It was Trychay who introduced and built up the cult of St Sidwell, ensuring that her gilded image was equipped with silver shoes, Trychay who devoted twenty years ...”

“... fits Robert Mugabe all too well. Mugabe and Mbeki think that provided the Government is a self-described ‘national liberation movement’, people ought to be content, but they aren’t. Zimbabweans, black and white, want a liberal democratic society – all the polls show that. Nobody wants to undo national liberation, but they do want desperately ...”

“... here? This is Homes’s first novel in six years, and her penetrating critique has given way to self-help truisms: ‘There is no VIP room in reality . . . You can’t Google the answers.’ Feral chihuahuas would have been sharp ten years ago; now, with every C-list starlet toting a teacup Tinkerbell, it’s so plausible it’s ...”

“... Oslo negotiations in 1991, all the Palestinians could hope for in the short run was an ‘interim self-governing authority’. That is what they got in the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s, and is all they have today. Sovereignty was excluded then, and it is still withheld by Israel and the US on the classic colonial grounds that the Palestinians have not yet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... night. There were armchairs between the racks. As one B&N publicity statement put it (intending self-praise), these were ‘amusement parks for the mind’. Sad people would virtually live there, phantoms of the bookshop. There were in-store play areas for children, while their parents shopped for the books that would give their offspring a head-start in ...”

“... French trouvères, Italian stilnovisti, German Minnesinger – cultivated an intense artistic self-consciousness. They were the first vernacular poets to forgo anonymity: their songs were painstakingly collected in chansonniers, manuscripts variously furnished with illuminations, music, even fanciful biographies of the poets. In English, by ...”

“... moments, when Tilly lets us know something about his own life without any of the modern jargon of self-exposure. Tracing what he calls his ‘line of argument’ back through American pragmatism, Why? shows the very real advantages of not talking psychologically when one is most tempted to do so. Tilly’s shorthand for this approach is to quote the great ...”

“... owed more to Renaissance notions of sprezzatura than to bourgeois calculations of collective self-interest. Lilti also portrays the salons as places where one did more than just cold-bloodedly exchange ideas according to the precepts of Habermasian rationality: in salons, people ate, drank, sang, gambled, flirted and seduced within the framework of what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”