“... Her ferociously high standards have led her to withhold from Ludo the identity of his father, a self-important philistine she once slept with out of politeness and never set eyes on again. She decides that repeated viewings of her favourite film, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, will provide him with appropriate ‘role models’, and a strong ...”

“... Marxist’. I am not sure I understand what that label means. One of the last major figures to self-identify that way was Eduard Bernstein, who pioneered democratic socialism in the German parliamentary system. But Ypi seems to mean something more general: a lingering suspicion that the left will forget about universal morality in its headlong pursuit of ...”

“... had urged me to tone down the offending sketch, particularly the erection/reaction gag but (rather self-righteously) I refused. There wasn’t much laughter that night in the rest of the show, which normally went by in gales of hilarity, but with the audience only concerned with what the Royal Party was thinking, much of it passed in awkward silence.It’s ...”

“... in the invasion and destruction of East Timor and its opposition to West Papuan demands for self-determination. The Australian contingent in the Five Eyes put considerable resources into intelligence operations in East Timor in the early 2000s, and successive governments have refused to negotiate a maritime boundary there, wanting to continue to reap ...”

“... presumably, be already sufficiently disconcerted to learn of the means chosen by Queen Anna to self-administer an abortion in 1603 without needing to translate ‘scho had gottin sum balme watter, whilk haistnit hir abort’. Similarly, the young Elizabeth’s description of her wigs as ‘pykit vyr, coverit vith heir, to ver on my head’ jars with ...”

“... a house, ‘Gallows make the sign of the cross with his forefingers and kiss it. “Tomorrow self please God I going to look for a work, whatever it is, if is not executiving I won’t mind directing a bank or something. I will give up the search for that fiver that I lost one day and concentrate on reality.”’They plan to raise money by organising a ...”

“... for who will verify that? Fourth, and most embarrassing, the principle of verifiability is self-refuting: for either it is itself empirically verifiable, or it is ‘merely formal’ (whatever that may mean), or it is meaningless. Since it cannot claim to belong to either of the first two categories, it seems condemned to belong to the third, in which ...”

“... extent brought on themselves. To use Hynes’s words, ‘part of the argument was that English self-indulgence and English tolerance of disruptive movements, like Irish nationalism and Suffragism, had encouraged the Germans to think that England would not, and could not, fight.’ Then, as knowledge of the actualities of trench-warfare began to enter the ...”

“... clothes seem to be made for adults) is not a random choice. Reading Price’s extracts from the self-dramatising journal kept by Michael Leiris in the Thirties in which he describes how he robbed masks and fetishes in Africa, it is hard not to dream about returning them (and Leiris, bound hand and foot) to the tribes in question. Reading her detailed ...”

“... But then Albert died. Like many a Victorian woman, the Queen wanted to withdraw into the self-enclosed seclusion of private grief and gloom. And for over a decade, that is precisely what she tried to do. But although she was now a widow, she was also still the Queen, and during the 1860s and early 1870s she found it exceptionally difficult to ...”

“... to minister only to pathos and exasperation, yet at the time it was meant (with what clutching at self-deception, who can know?) to comfort. 1939? Early days? Evil days, and evil tongues, and more than tongues.The Age of Wonders has two endings, because – unusually for Appelfeld – the book is phased as two Books. Of all the novels it is the one which has ...”

“... dealings with Britannia Biscuits. ‘Ask him to show it to them,’ he said with great pride and self-assurance. The piece of paper, which seemed blank at first glance, had its entire space filled with three large words written with a ball-point:                 BRITANNIA                       IS ...”

“... who ignored the remonstrators, at their peril. Even before 1949, the habits of criticism and self-criticism were strongly engrained. Until 9 May an entente between the students and the leadership was possible. Beyond that point, though every sign suggests they wanted to avoid a showdown, even after the fall of Zhao Ziyang, the factors that combined to ...”

“... books, a kind of de-graded art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic? Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial ...”

“... the 19th century, when homosexuality was made into a disease rather than just a sin or crime, that self-reprobation became a real problem for practising homosexuals. This is the view urged on us since Foucault, but it is difficult to believe. Heterosexual men of the 17th and 18th centuries felt a good deal of anxiety and guilt about their sexuality, and they ...”