“... 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 ...”

“... wanted only this of herself, a woman who at her marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacing. Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to-be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested in music and painting, and had no shortage of ...”

“... discredit Coleman’s evidence by drawing attention to his past unreliability. But the judge, Ed Self, a George W. Bush appointee, would hear none of it. The revelations of Coleman’s unfitness for the job, his debts, his violent temper, his racism, weren’t permitted as evidence. One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith was sentenced to 12 years in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But, in the end, what seems to have changed is the idea of the Mediterranean. Unlike his younger self, the veteran Church seems out of place in Fernand Braudel’s ‘Middle Sea’, where ‘the Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian [and] the whole sea shared a common destiny.’As Julia Clancy-Smith has shown, the ...”

“... William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one another.Among the ...”

“... him for many pages to come. Conversely, Call seemed hugely appealing as a young man, a model of self-control and integrity, perpetually annoyed by Gus. Over the course of the books, however, McMurtry slowly develops the friendship between the two, shifting the balance between the characters in the reader’s estimation. Gus is allowed to mature; he learns ...”

“... fee – people have tended to assume that the transformation which occurred in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how ...”

“... writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the ...”

“... that the archives in Istanbul have been opening up. Among the Turkish public at large, the old self-pitying, self-heroising patriotic myths remain entrenched. Popular literature and school textbooks paint a very misleading picture of what happened and help foment the sort of extremism that led to the murder of the ...”

“... he has not remarried and his daughter is now merely the old maid who puts up with his drunken self-pity and barked commands. Our hero, Hirayama, played by Chishû Ryû, is being nagged by his friend to avoid this fate, and above all avoid this fate for his daughter; and he does, but he takes a long time to come to his decision, he doesn’t have any ...”

“... they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?’ A claim to fame, a piece of flattery, grounds for self-congratulation, a temporising tactic, and an instance of absurd life imitating absurd art: this is a lot of work for a single phrase to do, yet none of it encompasses or even looks at the meaning of the phrase. The camps just flicker there in the ...”