“... over the Institute for Advanced Study years. ‘Or perhaps so many exhausted balloons’ is a self-conscious, superfluous flourish, after the vivid speed of ‘so many rag dolls’. Pak Parman would never have ‘whispered counter-hypotheses’. ‘People’ have displaced Djojo, and we get no chance to hear what their ‘hypotheses’ actually are. And ...”

“... concern has subtly shifted from the human rights of the East Timorese toward their right to self-determination. In this shift, Suharto’s age – he is now 74 – and growing signs of popular unrest in Indonesia, as well as conflicts among the ruling élite, certainly play their role. For Jakarta there is no way out. A return to the policies of the ...”

“... in a past kept deliberately indeterminate. It now turned on persecution, guilt, betrayal and self-betrayal, and on innocence too: the innocence of the children, and of a girl Kobus had briefly hankered after and then turned his back on, in desperate circumstances, during his adolescence. By this time the story had revealed itself to be, at a ...”

“... of the Groundnuts Order is not freakish; it simply employs the 20th-century mode to the point of self-parody. In very recent years, however, things have begun perceptibly to change. The influence of the Plain English campaign, championed by Margaret Thatcher, has begun to be noticeable throughout Whitehall, and some truly simple legislation has started to ...”

“... Hindley may want to present herself as a changed person, a different woman, a stranger to her past self, but the pittura infamante, a piece of the machinery of fame, traps her in its fixed semblance. That Harvey chose a four-year-old – not an older child, the age of Hindley’s victims – to model the hands that stick to Myra’s face shows how strongly the ...”

“... box office takings – can be achieved. Art galleries that are privately funded (the Saatchi) are self-evidently worse equipped to give the public a chance to exercise discretion than state-funded galleries (the Hayward) that can put on and charge for shows at a rate that might reflect what people think a trip to a gallery is worth. State-subsidised repertory ...”

“... they often have the qualities at once of profound representational power and of equally profound self-consciousness that we have associated with the dynamic of that emotion. Few readers will fail to be impressed, too, by the sophistication of his analysis of what happens in the mind of the young Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. It is equally ...”

“... a demagogue, perhaps beholden to a foreign government, rising to power. James Madison had a more self-interested objection to popular election. The political power of the South, where slaves made up 40 per cent or more of the population, had hugely increased, thanks to a clause adding three-fifths of the slave population to the number of free inhabitants ...”

“... an elective kinship: there’s almost a blurring between your own sensations, and impressions and self, and those of these writers. (Writers, incidentally, get no say in being elected to the inner family: you can imagine the dismay of the great dead at finding themselves so adored, and by such adorers. But publishing is also a relinquishment: you don’t get ...”

“... anti-communist heroes or cynical mercenaries, instead positing that both anti-communist ideas and self-interest shaped the émigré enterprise’. Certainly it would be hard to find a real anti-communist hero in either group from Tromly’s portrayal. The NTS comes out particularly badly: ‘relentlessly deceptive, associated with fascism and ...”

“... the said Henry Porter’ – but was acquitted by the jury at Southwark Assizes on a plea of self-defence. It’s the unspoken backstory of Beech’s Tragedy, direct from the mean streets of the Bankside. It adds a further shade of noir to this relic from the Rose’s true crime repertoire.Listen to Charles Nicholl discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on ...”

“... and Betty Cook were prominent in this movement, and credit the strike with developing their self-confidence and strengthening their political beliefs. Both have continued to fight for social justice and to stand on picket lines ever since. The women’s movement, and the alternative welfare state it created, played a pivotal role in enabling the miners ...”

“... punk-rocker and veteran magazine editor called Eugene Robinson. The only white guy was a self-effacing Rhodes scholar. My stories would round out the team, they said, and, it was implied, so would I, an Indian-American woman. They offered me twice the money I could make as a freelancer as well as good health insurance and thousands of stock options.I ...”

“... north and emptying into the sea near Alexandria.Egypt’s dependence on the Nile is central to its self-definition, but there’s something about that number, 95 per cent, that startles people when they are obliged to consider it. Everyone would ask: did I understand that a country with a population of 100 million, growing at 1.8 million a year, relied almost ...”

“... connections between one episode and the next. Thrown among other people, he is revealed to be a self-satisfied fraudster, ‘a perfect little saint, insufferable, always merry, always friendly, always polite’, much like ‘those serial killers who … to everyone’s surprise, turn out to be good husbands, good fathers, good friends – it was a question ...”