“... up. Not until Seymour-Smith, that is. He has simply decided that the received account is a lie, a self-invented myth, which Kipling later told himself and the world in order to manufacture a suitably damaged childhood and to punish his mother. (His sister incidentally supported the lie in order to grab some of the limelight.) That he can produce absolutely no ...”

“... out of – noting how certain painful areas in children’s lives (suffering from insecurity, low self-esteem, frizzy hair or whatever) are simultaneously tackled and converted into something altogether more momentous and intriguing. That she calls this process ‘conflict transformation’ is a pity, since jargon forms an odd accompaniment to the slang of ...”

“... that everyone, even the békés, actually spoke was included, it took the form of a condescending, self-alienating phonetics – the quaint mumbo-jumbo of the p’tit nègre. The novelists Maryse Cond and Simone Schwarz-Bart still write in standard French and look primarily to their African origins; their work is only faintly inflected by the postwar trend for ...”

“... is an obsession in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Under Indira Gandhi there was a growth of self-confidence on the part of the underclass in the big towns, and the change of mood had its effect on cricket, which discarded its colonial wardrobe, became more democratic and began to wear the colours of nationalism. In Sri Lanka in the Eighties cricket was ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... an argument, a question. At times he seems to argue that the Japanese have no conception of self, on the evidence of the shosetsu (for which ‘novel’ is the inevitable but not wholly accurate translation). Like other fresh studies, Accomplices of Silence has irritated the complacent and has still to receive the sincerest form of flattery. On the ...”

“... necessity of illusions, a necessity to which it sometimes romantically gives way with a certain self-consciousness. Thus Cunha lucidly notes how the soldiers propagate atrocity stories about the jagunços (‘ruffians’) who were their opponents: ‘They believed such stories as these; they made them up, seeking in advance an absolution for their ...”

“... of people who did ‘some not wholly fulfilling thing’ – Cuchulain fighting the waves, Robert Gregory taking to the air – their fulfilment to be achieved only when Yeats had emblematised them in strong verse. Seven: Dublin is a capital city in which ‘eight decades’ experience of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning ...”

“... Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad novelist, for he writes with a quite compelling ...”

“... the Survey of London began life as one of those ventures in historical preservation and national self-regard which burgeoned in the 1890s and 1900s, and included the National Trust, Country Life, the Burlington Magazine, the Victoria County History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Historical Monuments Commission. All were concerned with ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... obfuscating misbeliefs which can only be shown up and corrected by a knowledge of the past. This self-deception about the history of the family has particularly affected Western Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen, unless they have come across the work of recent historical sociologists, are likely to believe the following. That the co-resident ...”

“... The circuit from pure objectivity to subjectivity is complete. Old men write retrospective and self-revealing novels. William Seward Hall (‘a corridor, a hall leading to many doors’) plays off against William Seward Burroughs. Much of the work revolves around fictional St Albans and Johnsonville, by actual St Louis Missouri, where Burroughs was born in ...”

“... delays, and there have been reports of defendants getting to court late for hearings. Incidents of self-harm have increased by more than 4000 per cent since 2018 and guards routinely use violence to quell disorder. In one incident, captured by a body camera, a man collapsed after officers put him in a chokehold. ‘You’re not a very good actor,’ the deputy ...”