“... The taboo on graffiti reflects characteristically modern ideologies of cleanliness and bodily self-control. The taboo on marginalia, however, reveals a new model of reading. Our culture celebrates receptivity, a willingness to be marked by texts; in early modern England, though, this would have looked more like passivity, a failure to make a mark. In the ...”

“... great sophistication about the worrisome possibility that their visions and prophecies might be self-induced, self-validating or self-deceiving. Nicole Oresme, one of the greatest medieval mathematicians and philosophers, thought that most visionary experiences were the result of ...”

“... like a protest made from behind a teenager’s slammed door. How are we supposed to read Arvid’s self-absorption? Is his character the object of the novel’s analysis, or does he more straightforwardly embody the novelist’s own sensibility and intentions? The book amounts to one long accusation, directed at his mother, his wife, his brothers (who hover ...”

“... was larger than the party and therefore beyond the party’s immolations, its self-stabbings,’ she thinks. She knows what’s going to happen, so we don’t get to hear the actual proceedings of the show trial that follows: there is none of the rhetoric, or the dialogue. Rose dismisses it all as ‘droning insinuation’, and walks out ...”

“... Said and Partha Chatterjee, Gramsci and Marx, assembling from a scaffold of ideas a postcolonial self, stylishly accessorised with a checked kaffiyeh. Throughout Guapa, Haddad is more intent on giving Rasa a vivid, interrogative and comically self-dramatising inner life than mulling too long over the darker developments in ...”

“... TV marks his exile from the new world of foreign electronics and, according to his grief-driven, self-absorbed logic, makes him complicit in the death of his sons. They are dead, his aria goes, because he is a failed filmmaker, or because he was too cowardly to leave the family manse and try his luck in Bombay, or because the IT boss across the street has a ...”

“... commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to America in 1914, worked in construction and died young (there are echoes of Rothko, a generation earlier). Warhol moved to New York after ...”

“... it may be her ‘destiny … to be always alone’, yet she also sees this as a ‘tragic, self-dramatising thought’. She finds ‘a kind of comfort’ in it. This is fast work: self-pity aware of how stagey it is, but all the more employable for that reason. Another voice in Calista’s head says more modestly ...”

“... By the time the local surgeon arrived, he was dead. Born in Co. Longford in 1864, Wilson was a self-declared Irishman whose family had settled in the country during the conquests of the 17th century. He was a ‘political soldier’, in the words of the historian Keith Jeffery: an ardent advocate of Ulster Unionism who bitterly opposed any form of ...”

“... falls in love with Protestant man, nothing ends happily ever after – makes space for narrative self-consciousness. ‘This is going to end really badly, isn’t it?’ Cushla says to Michael, tipping a wink at what the reader must be thinking. And again: ‘We’re doomed. Apart from that we’re grand.’ The key question Trespasses asks itself, often ...”

“... the same way other animals invent shells or camouflage – as strategies of protection and self-concealment.Mona, first published in Spanish in 2019 (Oloixarac is Argentinian), looks at first to be simpler than her previous two books, but in fact it’s just as extravagant. It tells the story of Mona Tarrile-Byrne, a Peruvian writer studying at ...”

“... since 1989 – the world of neoliberalism which recognised that ‘markets, far from being self-regulating organisms, required strong governmental institutions.’ It is to this that he ascribes the modern growth of constitutionalism, not only within states but between them. For the latter, he points to such bodies as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO ...”

“... shaped by the paradigms of the West or of Soviet socialist planning have not enhanced a sense of self-determination. This was seen to be a problem not just in Islamic countries but in ‘Third World’ countries generally, and it was this sort of problem that the Non-Aligned movement set out to address. The movement was not always successful and did not get ...”

“... because how others react will, of course, help decide the direction this whole enterprise of self-definition finally takes. Indeed this is true of almost every aspect of our relations with Japan. It is important that we think carefully before reacting to anything, so sensitive are their antennae to outside response. Should we search for disturbing ...”

“... teacher to do everything. If you want your weans to get homework then give it to them your fucking self.    Gavin said: That actually sounds quite right-wing ye know.    Well it’s meant to be the fucking opposite and it is the fucking opposite.    Gavin nodded. Then:    Gavin gazed at him, then laughed briefly. He looked at Pat but Pat ...”