“... is that 25-year-old Tom is insulated by wealth and education, and Felix is buoyed by the self-help mantras going through his head. Bumming a cigarette, Tom asks Felix if he can hook him up with anything stronger. ‘My girl thinks I’ve got an invisible tattoo on my forehead: PLEASE ASK ME FOR WEED.’ Felix has little trouble coming out on top when ...”

“... plans, written after a catastrophic loss. In 1919, Guthrie’s older sister, Clara, died from self-inflicted burns, having set fire to herself during an argument with her mother. In 1927, Guthrie’s father, Charley, was severely burned in another fire: everyone suspected that his wife, Guthrie’s mother, Nora, had set fire to him, but Charley refused to ...”

“... modern reader . . . uncomfortable’. To me it seems grotesquely hypocritical, devoted to self-delusion. And for Richardson to start the next paragraph with ‘James was, in fact, enormously fond of dogs’ almost comically compounds the problem. Richardson’s gestures towards a wider history are brisk and potted, and also often verge on surrealist ...”

“... departure, his fort-da. When the critics didn’t slay him, he slew himself, both through physical self-evaluation (‘My hair has gotten sort of ratty looking, my face dull and sallow, and my front teeth have two visible black cavities that I am too lifeless to have fixed’) and through literary self-disembowelment: in ...”

“... to complain that the supposedly highly centralised Reich was in practice divided into dozens of self-willed satrapies; fundamentally, one of them despairingly noted, it altogether lacked ‘a functioning government’. Mazower is on slightly safer ground when he notes that German race laws in colonies like Namibia provided a basis for similar regulations in ...”

“... can it be autonomous? And who judges such autonomy, if not a reader? How can literature be at once self-communion and communication? Henry James, the subject of Author, Author, was perhaps the first major novelist in England to confront this dilemma head-on, living as he did at a transitional point between Victorian writers, for whom it was still possible to ...”

“... as a sham. We supposed the world was getting better when all the time it was just its old grim self, if not getting worse. The years were treacherous but we, it seems, were their accomplices. We could have known, and should have known, what was happening. The autocrats were wanton, but they were only the trigger, not the cause. They allowed us to see our ...”

“... of the subterfuge for himself. The sense of dread he conveys is authentic – it is a loss of self, of connection to the world. Romand’s actions seem an extrusion of this vacuity, a radical kind of thoughtlessness. Yet Carrère largely eschews forensic speculation: had he presented Romand as a psychopath with obscurely Oedipal fears and a megalomaniac ...”

“... do not disappoint. They both present their works as spirited acts of defiance, therapeutic self-explorations, terrifically difficult journeys inspired by, of all things, mother-love: ‘After my son was born,’ Margaret Salinger writes, I felt an urgency to make my way through the magic and miasma alike, through both history and fiction, to figure ...”

“... literary allusions, and yet barely a cadence or a phrase sounds derived. He seems as a poet not self-invented, which would be too knowing, but self-conceived. Like the idea of ‘new weather’, the title of his first extraordinary book, his poetry seems impossibly original. The End of the Poem attempts to show us how ...”

“... of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises political journalists, a recovering drunk of the type that is angry with everybody all the time, a foul-mouthed natural bully who genuinely hated most of the people it was his job to deal with on a daily basis, and made no secret of ...”

“... settled into the comforting mythology of the heroism of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the self-sacrifice of Florence Nightingale’? Surely the whole point of the Light Brigade story is that ‘someone had blundered.’ I can detect little eagerness to cover up the extent of the failures either then or now. As early as 23 December 1854 – before the ...”

“... south, by contrast, was colonised by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats, whose wealth and self-image relied heavily on the existence of a highly stratified native labour force, through whom they sought to create a world of feudal privilege of a sort fast disappearing in Europe itself. They entrusted local administration, and the all-important task of ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in.’ Was this the cinematic debut of the female barrier method? Did anyone other than me find it ...”