“... claims. So if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her own road accident a few years earlier, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid I did. As the years went by she must ...”

“... Frenchmen, men of ‘absolute normality’. The typical Houellebecq hero is a bored, alienated, self-pitying man who is losing his place in society, at work and, worst of all, in the bedroom. In a ruthless, zero-sum sexual marketplace, he loses out to men who are more powerful or more virile. Houellebecq is notorious for his pornographic depictions of sex ...”

“... to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue poet François Villon, imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1462; on the last float, the heroines from Jacques Rivette’s 1981 movie, Le Pont du Nord, are waving goodbye, along with the two keynote ...”

“... discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade Reimagined, due soon, will be another phase of his unstoppable campaign. Unger speaks primarily about the left and what it should do, but the old right finds itself in a ...”

“... the examination itself and they persisted long after examinations were over, my social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until long after my education proper was finished. December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime ...”

“... functions of nothing but custom and superstition and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language authorities boss them around. Unmoved by the cavils of the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that usage rules ‘survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations’, Wallace is aghast at the state of American ...”

“... by periods of falling out and kissing and making up with England, episodes in which national self-interest was always prominent, whether in James’s opportunistic support for Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII in the 1490s or his acquisition of Margaret as Queen in the 1500s. In the run-up to Flodden, James lodged his claim to the English throne should ...”

“... with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th century by Leonardo Bruni as studies meant to ‘perfect and adorn a human being’, the humanities to this day sing their ability to turn out individuals capable of independent critical thought. At the same time, in order to ...”

“... my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice. Parts of this advice are inevitably self-advice, or self-justification (Flaubert’s hatred of all forms of exercise, gymnastics and sport was well known). Parts of it miss the mark: it would take more than work to keep Maupassant in good health, since the ...”

“... Victorian Society. Today Stedman Jones denies he was ever a true believer, describing his younger self as more a ‘crypto-Fabian’ than a Marxist. Even at his most radical, he was never an economic determinist; and he didn’t believe that Marxists should be satisfied with a history from below that brought previously excluded figures into the standard ...”

“... by her mother and brother (her father is dead), she can hardly be said to have such a thing as a self-image. She sees her reflection in the mirror in virtually non-human terms: ‘It’s a face like a piece of technology, and her two eyes are cursors blinking … It expresses everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing.’ Connell’s ...”

“... or realistic act of violence emerged in the wake of the First World War, and became increasingly self-referential during and immediately after the Second. But it’s not the puzzle-solving that makes me read detective novels, though it provides much of the narrative momentum. It’s something else, something related to melodrama, and reflected in the ...”

“... Dahlographies, the first unofficial one by Jeremy Treglown (who busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film ...”

“... cars, second homes, inflation and pollution. If people were running their own affairs in local self-sufficient communities, they would not need to commute long distances between home and work. Where everyone bicycles to work, who would need a second home? They would make a stronger case for their programme if, instead of blaming human greed, they were to ...”

“... they were of personal inspiration only in the paradoxical sense that the equivocal convulsions of self abnegation which made up their subject-matter appeared to be mirroring, in what the French term a mise en abyme, my own self-effacing attitude to language as the externalisation of an interiority. (Recently, one of my ...”