“... and then passed on as far as Carthage, carried the message of Mani (a Mesopotamian prophet and self-styled inventor of a world religion) with disturbing ease across the frontier between Rome and Persia. On top of all this, the ‘self-indulgent idiocy’ of the Christians showed what people who claimed to be good Romans ...”

“... reasons’, to create an entire book in a largely seamless approximation of Moat’s tone: self-pitying, self-justifying, sentimental, with strong undercurrents of violence – like one long Geordie country and western song. ‘The aim,’ Hankinson writes in his author’s note, ‘was to stay within Raoul Moat’s ...”

“... of Nigeria, in his Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), which promised ever greater self-government once Nigerian client-rulers had learned a sufficient sense of fair play from their masters. But Sa’idu’s offer to sweep up the damage he has caused is also a grotesque version of the author’s own situation as a white radical in West ...”

“... is only one of the problems besetting the Pricklebush community; another is its appetite for self-destruction. Flighty, selfish and ultimately doomed, Angel is grotesquely fluent in the rhetoric of victimhood even while squaring up for a fight with the Eastside faction, and her belligerent self-pity is used by Wright ...”

“... that is rejected as the book goes on. Keith, the man in charge, is the only one who seems remotely self-assured, but he ends up breaking his arm after trying to show off. The group put on a brave face, singing round campfires, competing for small prizes, kissing under the trees and squabbling about politics. As night settles over the forest, we eavesdrop on ...”

“... Greenblatt has moved on, or back, and not only from Berkeley to Harvard. He ended Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with an account of Othello similar in shape to his present account of Hamlet, but pretty unconvincing; Hamlet in Purgatory hits the nail resonantly on the head. As is the way with new historicist interpretation, both expositions proceed by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... buccaneer capitalists and the waning of political power in the Thatcher years. The Century of the Self (2002) traced the way in which, during the course of the 20th century, Freud’s notion of the unconscious was recruited for a consumerist model of society in which politics became a matter of tapping into people’s desires. Two years later, The Power of ...”

“... illuminates both Fiona and Emily. In the novella Emily has her troubles, but is not reduced to the self-pitying, hated figure she becomes in the second half, in which her daughter remorselessly hates her. The war, hitherto excluded, is central to the second half. A brief biography of the real Alfred Tayler: ‘a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ring through the novels ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was trying, as Scholar says, ‘to show his readers that the language they spoke was not a self-evident set of meanings … but a process of making and remaking meaning in which they could choose to play a fully conscious and active part’. This is Scholar’s goal too, but the words he concentrates on have a quite special life, and this is where his ...”