“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”