“... truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle forms until the plain truth stands revealed. We ...”

“... for these flickers of understanding that women no doubt found so seductive. Eliot imitated the self-pitying voice of the disillusioned idealist. Both perversely ignored stalwart examples of womanhood close to home, and for the purposes of art hunted out those women of the drawing-room and slum who could easily be spurned as mental lightweights and ...”

“... various types, to people of every era. Beauty is a very different matter from fashion, grooming or self-presentation. Indeed, most women recognise the impossibility of achieving the highest beauty and thus – something of the sort was suggested in a few bare sentences by Theodore Zeldin in the second volume of France 1848-1945 – some fashion becomes a ...”

“... Rugby and boxing were frowned on by the chapels, but expanded to provide grounds for working-class self-esteem and hero worship. The chapels plugged teetotalism and the closure or banning of public houses. The working-class clubs expanded to provide opportunities for drink and drunkenness, which were particularly satisfactory to national feeling through being ...”

“... for wives.’ A wine-snob and a social snob, with mild literary aspirations, supercilious, self-dramatising and ineffective, Peterley drifts through some eight years, with little to look back on save a frigid marriage and the wrecking of the life of one of his mistresses (the Sydenham one, cast off for ‘dynastic’ reasons). It is by now Munich ...”

“... he assumes that a lot of what he gets told about Mayta by his fellow-countrymen is made up. This self-sabotaging narration, however, is not here some gratuitous chic, learnt in Paris: it is an indigenous form of realism, because Peru is like that: ‘Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, take refuge in ...”

“... Plot turns elicit a dazed ‘Jesus H. Christ’, and when the action flags the conversation slips self-consciously into neutral – ‘clichés and oddly reflective expressions’. Then there’s the always vital Banksian nomenclature: ‘Ronnie Skeeter’, ‘Dewey Knox’, ‘Hank Lank’, ‘Margie Fogg’. (‘While Jimmy’s been out there ploughing ...”

“... the emphasis or the grammar. This was an exercise in developing, within strict limits, a sense of self, what we would now call ‘subjectivity’. In engaging with the fables in particular, the student was learning about different points of view: although the ‘morals’ appended to them dictated the ideological message, the stories themselves told not just ...”

“... phenotypes are ‘massively modular’; therefore there is no such thing as the mind or the self; and (present company excepted) we are all self-deluding hypocrites. I’ll concentrate on 4), because it is the burden of Kurzban’s book, but I don’t believe a word of 1) to 3) either; in particular, I don’t believe ...”

“... thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?’) and self-conscious overwriting (‘Gob was dashed with horror, as if someone had filled a bucket with pure liquid horror and dumped it over his head’). The world of the novel is wildly inventive, with the emphasis on wild; it is the product of a brilliant ...”

“... because the narrator is so much more earnest than those in her previous books. She’s curiously self-censoring – thinking of her bottom as her ‘sit-me-down-upon’, and unable to bring herself to even think, let alone utter, the Trumpian maxim ‘grab ’em by the ––’ – but polite enough to clarify any potential ambiguities of thought ...”

“... BBC costume dramas), and they can find an appreciative audience for their work. Marina Amaral is self-trained, 22 years old, and lives in Brazil – she has a book of her own coming out later this year. Another consequence of the ‘Third Age’, for those who have grown up in it, is that our histories have been lived, partly, online. At some point last ...”

“... and gets pistol-whipped outside a nightclub by the son of a Duma deputy. There is a feud with a self-aggrandising academic rival, and a love triangle. Many of the characters’ romantic dilemmas, jokes and even literary references will be familiar to readers of Gessen’s first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Published in 2008, the year in which A ...”

“... When our​ nationwide self-isolation began in late January, it was said that Chinese people fall into two groups: cat types and dog types. Cat types were likely to suffer less from the quasi-house arrest that drives dog types mad. A cat type myself, I could see on WeChat Moments that my dog-type friends were going for a long walk every day, usually at midnight, when no one is around ...”

“... and misbehaviour. Oddly, the reverse is true. Brookner’s subject is the isolation of the self, unsupported by family affection, the gratifications of art or work, the fulfilment of romantic love, or the promise of religion. Above all, she insists that her readers consider the daunting consequences of age. ‘What courage it must take to grow ...”