“... violence: the names and causes change, the atrocities don’t. Christopher Tyerman exercises self-discipline in leaving to the last page of his text any explicit comparison between the Middle East in 1099 and in 2015. But on his very first page he introduces us to the Crusades as having their own, medieval Christian rationale: he wants us to avoid making ...”

“... On​ the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is doomed to end by putting itself out of the business of dictionary-making. Strictly speaking, all the definitions of the listed terms would have to be blanks, a new version of Flaubert’s dream of the ‘book about nothing’, a Dictionnaire des riens, replacing the Dictionnaire des idées reçues ...”

“... for the preposterous Sitwell family, having first given them a roasting for their insufferable self-importance, on the grounds that Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal figure of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the early years of the Cambridge English Faculty would greet a lecture ...”

“... themselves, and thus tend to practise what they preach. Studying sexuality is always at some level self-study, rather as writing about popular culture, for most of the students who do it these days, involves watching movies and TV shows they would have watched anyway. There is thus a convenient continuity between one’s academic and one’s actual life, as ...”

“... Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the books with her mother, intended them to be a defence of ‘the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man’ whom she saw ‘penalised from every direction’, but especially by the New Deal, which was ‘killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit’. She told a friend that if only there were a politician ...”

“... and too little creation’. This mode brings you Tolstoy’s historiography, or the relentless self-commentary of certain metafictionists. But there’s another option: the novel that doesn’t alternate drama and analysis but dramatises analysis itself. In such novels, characters are understood more by what they think and say than by what they do, and the ...”

“... after the Revolution in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, told me that my writing was deeply self-censored. I had left out the juicy stuff: the neighbour’s lesbian relationships, the opium addicts, the widespread plastic surgery, his incarceration. I did it to ‘protect people’, I told him. I wasn’t trying to sell books, I was trying to sell a ...”

“... one of a whole series of metaphysical fictions which includes agents, objects, mental acts and the self. The fact that the self can be found in this list is one reason why getting shot of substance is not as simple as it might appear. If it cannot be allowed simply to drop out of the picture, it is partly because we may find ...”

“... man in the Hathaway shirt’). Up swelled one of those colossal bubbles of pompous self-regard, enclosing account execs and art directors and copywriters, that leave their sticky residue on history. It’s a commonplace that portrayal of the past can be used to criticise the present. What of those cases in which criticism of the past is used to ...”

“... to whom it all ‘seems’) shape the narrative of the poem. The tension between the self who desires and the self who notices, often fudged in translation, has been an essential element in the influence of Sappho’s poem on later writers of lyric. For Carson, what matters is Sappho’s poetry, not her gender ...”

“... to porn in a page, from raddled lust to a sense of its abject absurdity (Mickey Sabbath’s self-mocking epitaphs in Sabbath’s Theatre, or most of Rabbit’s antics). Oates’s fictional worlds are too harsh for belly laughs or even wry smiles. In her latest novel, The Tattooed Girl, Oates appears to respond to the comparisons made between her work ...”

“... age superstitions: astrology, palmistry, the reading of auras and energies, and the twin goals of self-development and self-enhancement. Mantel wryly deflates the pretensions and the language of spiritualism: one of Al’s bitterest regrets is that Morris is so vulgar and cruel, while ‘other mediums have spirit guides ...”

“... empire. They reject the popular idea that Americans go to war only as a last resort, motivated by self-defence or the desire to preserve and spread freedom rather than national aggrandisement. ‘Good wars’, like the Revolution and World War Two, which seem to fit this model, are memorialised in Washington, Hollywood films and national bestsellers. Anderson ...”

“... are harsh lyrics about promise and failure, and even the title of ‘I Had a Future’ admits self-doubt. Among these poems, however, are also the triumphantly assertive lyric manifestos of ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Innocence’, ‘The Hospital’, and ‘Epic’, which begins: I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided: who ...”

“... and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La ...”