“... 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 ...”

“... The battle of the ‘little man’ with daily disobligingness is a classic New Yorker trope; the self-generating litany pure Barthelme.This example comes from ‘Down the Line with the Annual’, a story from 1964 about a couple who turn to consumer reports to anchor themselves when everything else seems to be ‘falling apart at an accelerated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... go back home. Dad is so mean. There shouldn’t be a reason. Could there be a speck of my original self anywhere? – that I have left behind. God, and if I have forgotten about it, can it save ...”

“... Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray another word In this sodality, self-repressing and male, And we discover, hardly believing our eyes And ears, a sort of chromatic scale, That whatever lives and feels is logos. Tell us then, vanity, what is truth And how does it differ from honesty? Ecclesiastics and analysts play sleuth To ...”

“... in our minds such corrupt purity, never escaping but sinking into not the unthinkable gift of the self to death, not the sea flash flood in the throat, but into the oracle of the drowned; because the oracle of the dying comes to a halt but the oracle of the dead continues and has humour in it. We ask the dying, ‘How do you go about drowning?’ and the ...”

“... Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas. Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of the disciples, and forgone a life on the quest for the rest. And a good book. Or a decent cause. fear Laird Jnr was a tyke, a terrier. A nit-picker who grew to a hair-splitter, he was not so much scared of his shadow, as of its ...”

“... 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 ...”