“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... many of his characters. Mihály could be seen as a wimp, and that is how he sees himself. He is self-aware, self-analytical, sophisticated and articulate, and these qualities are shared by most of the other dramatis personae. It makes a nice change from novels that specialise in heroes and heroines who can only ...”

“... terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation’; and there was a similar touch of self-conscious experimentalism in Shepard’s space cowboy persona. Bob Dylan, he admiringly observed, ‘has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own ...”

“... cultural circumstances are very different, much here is reminiscent of Beckett’s fictions of the self-enclosed, self-obsessed consciousness, the sense they convey that we are watching a man watching himself drift ever closer towards the abyss. Andrés begins by imagining, in morbid detail, the search party that will ...”

“... writes letters to David, the married lover she left back in England. Their affair is undone by his self-indulgence, the egoism that allows him to whisk Edith into the wings when she threatens his comfortable life at home: ‘She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself anything.’ Edith reveals nothing about the split. In the ‘enclosed world of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”