“... room where his mother, Qi Xin, and her four children huddled together.After trying to atone by self-criticism and the obedient acceptance of ritual humiliation, Xi Zhongxun was demoted to deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang, once a Tang dynasty imperial capital and now a metropolis, but at that time a very grim place. Having been punished as an ...”

“... Horned Man (2002) gave us an absent-minded professor whose confidence in the unknowability of the self masked deep corruption; Seven Lies (2006) offered a damaged liar mixed up in international intrigue. The book of Lasdun’s that I recalled most intensely while reading The Fall Guy was his 2013 memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. It ...”

“... also unaware that Netanyahu’s government has never recognised the Palestinian right to national self-determination and statehood in any part of Palestine, even though this right has been affirmed repeatedly by the UN Security Council (e.g. Resolution 242 in 1967 and Resolution 1515 in 2003) and by the International Court of Justice (in 2004). The ...”

“... towards the end of the Peloponnesian War (which Athens would lose), ascribes more agency and more self-delusion to the callous father and to his idealistic, self-sacrificing child, and finds in the myth a dark picture of selfish, over-privileged men who value their own interests and reputations over the lives of young ...”

“... books. Disapproving parents loom, are disappointed and disappointing. A mousy mother – needy, self-abnegating and trapped – is often a foil to a distant and dominating father. Three Strong Women (2009) opens with Norah, a lawyer in her late thirties, arriving in Dakar from Paris to visit her father. Their relationship is strained. He shows her a ...”

“... how the rest of MacLean’s poetry is born out of war, out of the clash of warring elements of the self, and out of divided loyalties, as well as out of the heroic fight for the survival of his people’s language and culture. It is no accident that the last poem in this book, the recent ‘Screapadal’, is a meditation both on the clearance of Raasay in 1846 ...”

“... rather than a builder-up of egos, her own included, which finds no favour with her. Her lack of self-love is striking in autobiography; towards the end, self-pity creeps in. But even that is part of her sensational boot-in honesty: she does not spare herself, deny unhappiness, or curry favour by displaying a socially ...”

“... It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable sell, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a ...”

“... so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find societies where, for a while, ideals prevail over self-interest; restraint over self-indulgence. That it was so in Dorchester is Professor Underdown’s fascinating discovery. Early in the 17th century there was an extraordinary fall in the number of bastards born, or at least ...”

“... childhoods. Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). At once passionate, meditative and intensely self-reflexive, Landscape set out to challenge the sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy ...”

“... is no why to it, only a here and a there.’ ‘How circumstantial reality is,’ Updike wrote in Self-Consciousness, his book of memoirs. ‘Truth is anecdotes, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian.’ Snug for Updike and his male heroes, we need to add. Alf’s writing, as the inventory above may begin to suggest, is full of delight in the evoked absurdity ...”

“... piece of characterisation, both historically and psychologically plausible in his altruistic self-importance and rationalistic crankiness. Kellogg’s principles for ‘biologic living’ involved strict vegetarianism, teetotalism and sexual abstinence, combined with exercise, hydrotherapy, phototherapy and frequent colonic irrigation. None of the ...”

“... not having armed themselves’, as she puts it. Or for having been so obsessed with their sexual self-discovery that they simply failed to see what was happening beyond it. At the beginning of the book, Sara Maitland announces her search for ‘signs of hope and self-criticism’ to enlighten the Eighties, and praises the ...”

“... points’. To the Argentinian naturalist Francisco Muñiz Darwin writes both sympathetically and self-interestedly: I cannot adequately say how much I admire your continued zeal, situated as you are without means of pursuing your scientific studies and without people to sympathise with you, for the advancement of natural history; I trust that the pleasure ...”

“... Nuremberg trials, Lord Shawcross, was writing the other day, in the tone of those who state the self-evident, since when other voices have echoed him, ‘to insist on the surrender of Saddam to be tried for his crimes.’ I am all for getting rid of the malodorous Saddam, but would trying him for his crimes of war, however monstrous these have ...”