“... madness or bitterness or humiliation, it’s not a camouflaged homicide or a grandiose display of self-loathing – it’s the finishing touch to the running gag ... For anyone who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. There is panic as well as levity in this stuff, of course; there’s nothing funny about realising which things are funny. And the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is an enormously important person historically, more important than his own cheerfully truculent self-estimate. It is a cliché of left liberal conversation that the mildest reform politics is impeded by what is called Essex Man, the self-seeking, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rhetoric and flourish, he too often allows these two-edged gifts to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic stance’ (Eavan Boland); ‘I have found Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy ...”

“... oil’. Cal swears in French whenever his guilt or nerves give way; in one instance he reveals his self-hatred in the expletive series: ‘Merde. Crotte de chien. Merderer.’ Mac Laverty’s diction is part of a linguistic exhumation, a verbal archaeology: the ‘whorl’ of an ear, the ‘tuggy’ toast, someone ‘thran’. The heroine is Catherine ...”

“... Andrew Wiles, a Cambridge mathematician living in the United States, emerges after seven years of self-incarceration and paranoid secrecy from his Princeton attic, clutching two hundred pages of hieroglyphics. He is triumphant. He has cracked the most famous problem in number theory: Fermat’s Last Theorem, which has eluded some of the finest efforts of ...”

“... first person that rubs against the excerpts from Michel’s tormented writing and his own fits of self-importance. Moments of fine physical observation sit awkwardly in a ludicrous account of how the institutional world works, while a very Victorian use of coincidence, magic and destiny does a measure of spiritual duty, as well as rounding off the plot. Some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots retorted that this was nothing to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”