“... of the book: ‘It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.’ But for all the self-congratulation exhibited in this portentous exhortation, and in the sentimentality with which he briefly recounts the stories of individual victims, he fails in this task. To succeed, he would have needed to explore the lives of his emblematic victims in far ...”

“... cent of people are believed to experience it) or if it’s the other way round, and my wished-for self-imposed isolation exacerbates my response to noise. In any case, I’m loath to find I have a ‘condition’. Apart from anything else, it wouldn’t be normal, but it also wouldn’t be normal in a really annoying way that makes me a sufferer, rather than ...”

“... a decade later. Armed with a winning manner and what must have been deep reserves of moral self-confidence, she stalked her reluctant protagonists for months and sometimes years until they agreed to talk to her. What it took to win the trust of the family, and the redemptive results of her persistence, are important aspects of her investigation, as ...”

“... being swamped by repetition, and of replicating Petrarch’s story. The worst do indeed repeat and self-replicate endlessly. But it also means that the Petrarchan love sonnet has a touch of what came to be thought of as the sublime: because it does not quite tell a story it seems always to be gesturing to something beyond itself, a love which is never either ...”

“... class’, inscribing themselves into the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia.* That act of self-inscription tells us a great deal about the way Soviet dissidents saw themselves. But should we accept this pedigree at face value? The more closely one inspects Bergman’s argument, the less persuasive it seems. The dissident movement did not recapitulate ...”

“... with the economics profession. The notion economists pushed – that markets are efficient and self-adjusting – gave comfort to regulators like Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe in regulation in the first place. They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades ...”

“... as Konstantin on Broadway long ago, meaning that he’s channelling his own best, happiest self as well as the role – touching, which is the real twist of the knife. To add that pathos to the black, black joke is the touch of genius, because, unlike, say, the nice family who miraculously show up at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Treplevianly bleak ...”

“... was listed as a target for pre-emptive attack in what Condoleezza Rice termed ‘anticipatory self-defence’. As one US official said to Seymour Hersh: ‘Don’t be distracted by all this talk of negotiations … they have a plan and they are going to get this guy after Iraq. He’s their version of Hitler.’ Such rhetoric may play well at home, but it ...”

“... to take pictures. The story is about a woman who can’t cope, and part of that failure – or her self-deceptive strategy for making it through the day – is to put herself in the third person, to become an onlooker. And sometimes the narrators tell themselves nothing at all, but even this is meaningful, as in ‘Certain Knowledge from Herodotus’: ‘These ...”

“... seemed a fragile conceit, even a gimmick, until with the passing of time it moved from metaphor to self-evident truth, and one that applies at least as much to London as New York. In Did You Ever Have a Family the incomers (income being very much the point) can slip in and out of Wells as they like, while the inhabitants have very limited choices. There is a ...”

“... successful it was the more it resembled a Tammany party: rather lazy, a little corrupt and very self-satisfied. Its best people continued to go to Westminster, even after the Scottish Parliament was set up in 1999; the early death of Donald Dewar, who went in the other direction, robbed the Scottish party of one of its few heavyweights. Over the last decade ...”

“... and baptism, and the sign of its presence was a flow of tears. Weeping was not simply emotional self-indulgence or psychological release. It was efficacious. As Dixon puts it, ‘in the Catholic worldview, tears could do things. They had real, spiritual consequences for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas ...”

“... from other oil companies, Coll writes, ‘tended to regard their Exxon cousins as ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable, but also as priggish Presbyterian deacons who proselytised the Sunday school creed Rockefeller had lived by: “We don’t smoke; we don’t chew; we don’t hang with those who do.”’ One executive, Coll writes, was startled to ...”

“... Hizbullah militias. At first, Grossman seems to have felt that the incursion was a limited act of self-defence, justified by Hizbullah’s cross-border attack in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two kidnapped. But he soon changed his mind, and at a public meeting called for a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement. Two days later, the news came ...”

“... up their Chinese off-road vehicles, their Mercedovs or mobilovs, their drugs or delicacies. This self-serving attitude is wedded to an utter contempt for their own people, who appear in Komiaga’s narrative as simple, dumb peasants – subservient but also stubborn, inconveniently prone to resent their rulers. We get only indirect indications of this from ...”