“... 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 ...”

“... apart.For the woman, Greek is ‘a language as cold and hard as a pillar of ice … a supremely self-sufficient language’. That self-sufficiency is captured in a lesson on ‘a third voice’, neither active nor passive, ‘which we call the middle voice’, expressing ‘an action that relates to the subject ...”

“... one’ – a subject about which Chaudhuri has written. In fact, he stages an act of fictional self-erasure when his narrator becomes so involved in Berlin that he loses his sense of self. He becomes a conduit, open to the intimations of the past within Berlin’s present:I don’t feel anxious because the streets are ...”

“... she remarks, ‘above the Black and Brown, but below the White. Obedient. Docile. Abject.’ If self-hatred and status consciousness aren’t enough to keep such a buffer in place, the police will do it: a cop in a prominent hate crime investigation ‘has been promoting anti-Chinese T-shirts on Facebook: “Covid-19 imported virus from Chy-na”. I don’t ...”

“... In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is the life they have on Love Island, an endless parade of self-tanning and nail extensions, gym sessions and Prosecco.When the Sunday Times Rich List was first published, in 1989, the person at number one was the queen. At the time, she was worth £5.2 billion, and it seemed logical, in a farcical, doilies-and-teacups ...”

“... innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s admiration for the community he’d rejected grew to mirror his contempt for the would-be assimilated Jews of the Western capitals, though he was himself just such a Jew. The Ostjuden came to embody an endangered world ...”

“... performed, and were pleased that a job that had to be done was done so well. National pride and self-confidence were renewed. I find this conclusion no less extraordinary than I found the concluding paragraphs of the Franks Committee Report, which altogether failed to engage with the substance of what had preceded them. Hastings and Jenkins produce ...”

“... with a sharp, Mondrian-like orthogonality. Nikita Sena Quarshie in the show catalogue compares the self-possession with which these men are brimming to ‘the itutu or mystic coolness of the Yoruba’ – a compliment to Marshall, who likes to point upwards to West African forms of thought. For Greg Tate, De Style’s males and their female analogues in School ...”

“... and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular ...”

“... Heinrich their genius, but for his two sisters, Julia and Carla, it offered instability and self-destruction: they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul ...”

“... Writer-translators with their own style and worldview might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ...”

“... largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto associated with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee ...”

“... political memoirs are no exception, not least because so many of them are at heart exercises in self-justification. Writers, actors, sportsmen and everyone else who writes memoirs are telling their own story, but they are not usually, not primarily, doing so to justify themselves. Political figures, by and large, are. It creates a strain, and the strain ...”