“... 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 ...”

“... like a children’s book, Mister Pip is not one, and it is wiser, at least at intervals, than the self-help book it sometimes resembles. Odd though it sounds, it is impossible not to wonder whether in writing this sometimes wonderful, sometimes tedious, unfinished-seeming novel about reading to an audience Jones ever paused to wonder about his own ...”

“... then in girls. Growing up in Honolulu, he was insulated from racial prejudice and even from racial self-consciousness. But there are not very many black people on the island and towards the end of his time there Obama began to be aware of his blackness, not least when he started going to parties and dating. One of the best scenes in the book occurs near the ...”

“... with Elizabeth, who from early in her reign used the progress as one of her chief methods of self-publicity, and went further afield to show herself to her subjects than her father had normally done. Monarchs who went on regular progress were usually successful. It is Elizabeth that we remember as the Virgin Queen, but this was not an unusual image ...”

“... Western nihilism, 9/11 is cast as the latest in the West’s seemingly interminable catalogue of self-inflicted blows against its own dominant myth of progress. The transposition is revealing, for it suggests that Gray writes from the assumption that, if there were progress, it would have taken the form of the universal adoption of either Communism or ...”

“... and it doesn’t help that Karzai is widely seen as indecisive and at the mercy of a cabal of self-interested advisers. Meanwhile, the failure of the government, and of its international allies, to ensure basic security is the single most important cause of public disaffection in Afghanistan. The focus of international attention is the rising number of ...”