“... may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the principal industry is, or was, mining. Gabriel García Márquez ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and, bizarrely, the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which takes inspiration from self-proclaimed Christian prophets. Nafie had assured the Ethiopian intelligence chief that the summit would pass without incident. It’s still not clear whether he was lying, or had been kept in the dark. At any rate, Gebre Medhin had his revenge twice ...”

“... had made the local economy deeply dependent. As a result, when the border was closed in 1993, self-sustainment was no longer possible – the means weren’t there. Decades of expropriation and deinstitutionalisation had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could ...”

“... then at least as ‘decent ethnocides’. And if your definition of a just war extends beyond self-defence to include armed intervention in outlaw states, as it does for Rawls, then opportunities for genocides of this type increase exponentially. It would, for example, be possible to put up a robust defence of the genocide of native peoples in the New ...”

“... of the run; hence the anguish that followed it). He cuts a curious figure on the field, compact, self-contained, quintessentially Australian in his weather-beaten baggy green cap, but also fidgety and uncertain, his close-set, small, deliberately blinking eyes striving to give off an air of preternatural calm while also hinting at a vacancy and a sense of ...”

“... shape. Why were immigrants, or the sons and daughters of immigrants, so invisible in France’s self-representation? He thought the answer could be found in Fanon. ‘The gaze of the other,’ he said. ‘It’s all still there.’ A colonial question after all, then. Most of the youth rioting at the end of 2005 were not alive at the time of the Beur March ...”

“... transmit it directly. That’s the theory anyway. Of course formalist art can seem very glassy and self-absorbed, alienating – as so many people find Greenaway’s films. His 1988 TV film Death in the Seine, for instance, sounds fascinating: a series of tableaux showing bodies pulled from the Seine in the years 1795-1801, with descriptions and personal ...”

“... His gaucherie was itself charming. He was to reach an eminence almost beyond criticism, and beyond self-criticism too. With great fame, he grew somewhat snobbish and reactionary. Martin, who gives admirable accounts of Tennyson’s houses at Farringford and Aldworth, deftly points up the parallel between the aging poet and his extraordinary cousin Charles, an ...”

“... agnostics and atheists among my acquaintance, however, found the novel rather sad. All that self-denial and sacrifice of libido depressed them. I think it would depress me, too, now, if I didn’t know that my principal characters would have made a sensible decision long ago to avail themselves of contraceptives.’ I will always have a special fondness ...”