“... to slow this down, and there seems to have been a ‘flicker of hope’ among some settlers that self-government, when it came, might give them disproportionate power, as in South Africa and (effectively) Southern Rhodesia, but that just shows how out of touch they were. (There were simply not enough of them.) The main consideration in Whitehall – Elkins ...”

“... aims as a people, and therefore of an effective strategy for ending the occupation and achieving self-determination. This is a long-standing weakness, as Edward Said often argued in these pages. It dates back to the Mandate era, when the Palestinians, unlike many other Arab national movements of the same period, failed to build up the centralised ...”

“... outlet, he says ‘I gave myself a bruise’ – his body growing covered with the marks of his self-abuse. ‘Even after a year,’ he tells us, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things, like taking showers, for some reason, and getting into elevators, obviously. There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension ...”

“... leaders pursued exactly the opposite policy: there was a great revival of central planning and self-reliance. Some readers in Beijing suspect that The Tiananmen Papers are a fake. China, after all, is the land of fakes and forgeries. Sales of fake Coca-Cola, Duracell batteries, Nike shoes, Levis, French wine, American peanut butter, Boeing aircraft ...”

“... Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its horrible secret in the process: it doesn’t travel, and it may now be ruined for home use. ‘Some day ...”

“... and the Masses: that works of literature are variegated and disruptive, that they are frequently self-divided, that they may rebel against the ideologies of their creators and that they can’t be pillaged for compliant quotations. It is just this that Carey seems to discover about Brighton Rock, a novel he used in his last book as an example of Modernist ...”

“... that are essentially authoritarian, and discussion leads to division. The insufferable self-righteousness and pedantry of guerrilla leaders is not just a common character trait, it is functional: the leadership has always to be right. The Farc’s negotiating style has all the charm of the small print in an insurance policy, but it is similarly ...”

“... from Armida is prompted by shame and rage at the reflection of his curled hair and effeminate self in a shield. The poem also tries heroically to weave passionate love, which had driven Ariosto’s Orlando mad, into an argument for voluntary servitude. Erminia, who was captured by Tancred, then freed by him, remains a slave to him in love, and ends the ...”

“... Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973 and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the old historians.’ The old historians, in contrast, had been ‘highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth’. It was Simha ...”

“... person.’ A New York person was not a good thing to be. Bruno found they tended to be noisy and self-regarding, and they always let you know they were from New York. Bruno, who was born in Baghdad and taken to the Bay Area as an infant, liked to boast that he’d never been east of Reno. He did admit once that he wouldn’t mind ‘flying to Iowa and having ...”

“... pillaged, privatised several times over, modified, tamed: but it still operates according to the self-renewing, evolution-designed system of nature. It is still a source of wonder, humility and, in its remaining unpredictability, hope – resources that, in this country at least, are in much shorter supply than sliced white bread. And the ecosystem is still ...”

“... whole. Those who over the years found Teller to be an ‘organisational disaster’ – petulant, self-centred, tyrannical, deceitful and ultimately disloyal to his friends and colleagues – likewise misunderstand the man. ‘My friendships are deeply important to me,’ Teller writes: ‘I much prefer to get along with everyone, so when someone I care about ...”

“... fastest-growing . . . social class on earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In practice, the growth of the informal sector has not even brought about the satisfaction of rudimentary needs ...”

“... The incident tests her love of her subject: ‘Could he have been so demoralised as to lose self-restraint and invite the schoolgirls to touch his swollen genitals?’ The received view is that he was innocent, but although Maddox disagrees she is mysteriously willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: ‘On the other hand, if Jones had simply been ...”

“... the Communist contender, whose predecessor Robert Hue fared disastrously in 2002. Buffet is the self-styled candidate of the ‘popular anti-liberal left’: a left-of-socialist coalition that failed to come together at the end of last year, enabling the Communists to appropriate the title, which always looked more serviceable than the project. Buffet and ...”