“... be simple and not acting, it is almost impossible for a director to make simple folk refrain from self-conscious miming.’ We have seen this phenomenon, recently, on television: when the cameras are taken into a police station, the simpler policemen who think themselves clever show off and show themselves up. So it is with George Neville, trying to project ...”

“... only to themselves. The business of educating yourself out of this condition parallels the ethical self-training that all writers of fiction undergo. When, in Money, we meet the character Martin Amis, he seems, in his fully developed selfhood, a curiously stiff and priggish figure (‘I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I ...”

“... let the locations become labelled diagrams of historical forces or exotic backdrops for American self-exploration. And the narrative voice can be funny and gossipy as well as pained. In ‘Asian Tiger’, the golf pro, who gets a close-up view of money laundering and counterinsurgency, finds time to be dismayed by the Burmese generals’ blatant cheating on ...”

“... unfunny) courtroom jests recall the world of Albion’s Fatal Tree, with its smug, self-interested judges and their crushing response to property crime. Wit usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate malefactor, mirroring the imbalance of power in practice. Even the rare exceptions give the punchline to power. In the 1721 edition ...”

“... Badgers, published last year, also has a West Country setting (frankly Devonian), not to mention a self-consciously pretty town trying to set itself apart from a larger settlement nearby, disowning any connection with a hinterland where things aren’t so pretty.* The role taken by the parish council in Pagford is played, more sinisterly and with greater ...”

“... position that the wish to humiliate is part of everyone’s survival kit: our (often preferred) self-cure for the inevitable frustrations of our own childhood. There is something intrinsically and unavoidably humiliating about being a child. Every child has felt humiliated by his dependence on his parents – by his relative powerlessness in relation to the ...”

“... to be gilt, inlaid with little iron stars. Just like the members of the imperial family, or any self-respecting senator, he is a phenomenal self-publicist, but the kinds of achievement that are inscribed and celebrated all over his house are laughable, for example, a painted sequence of his life story commemorates, among ...”

“... history: trampling on ideas, principles and beliefs until they were indistinguishable from crude self-interest. Yet Namier was, arguably, the 20th century’s most original historian. His work on England in the third quarter of the 18th century – there were two masterpieces, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in ...”

“... government should do. They quickly ramped up their testing capacity, educated the public about self-isolation, shut down large gatherings, restricted travel, increased hospital capacity. They have allocated 30 trillion won (£19 billion) to the response. They have confirmed 6593 cases, but only 42 deaths so far – though only 41 people have been declared ...”

“... decades earlier to her liberation from her small-town life and her awkward, angry, unhappy younger self. Her misery is riveting, and we can’t even look away from her laxative-induced bowel movements: ‘torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out’. The novels share themes but are written in starkly different ...”

“... them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and especially to figure, opened up possibilities of advancement. Those who understood at least something of navigation and ...”

“... into. Of course he wanted to put his personal stamp on US policy, and of course he offers up the self-justifications common among members of Trump’s cabinet, who have claimed at various times that they were working behind the scenes to save the country, or the party, or the presidency, from the president himself. During the first two years of Trump’s ...”

“... by pop’. Until J. goes for the record (a gesture we are to see as simultaneously subversive and self-defeating), no one else had ‘given a fuck’, which is why they were put on the List in the first place. For all the supposed power of larger and unknowable mechanisms and forces, the junketeers and their dupes are presented as culpable; the satiric ...”

“... in 1904 and sank without trace. Then, in 1980, 43 school exercise books, laboriously written in self-taught French and studded with Breton words and turns of phrase, were produced miraculously intact by Déguignet’s descendants in response to a newspaper appeal by a local history project. From them, local historians derived a continuous narrative, and the ...”

“... inventive and ingenious ways. The novel’s more complex narrative structure, and its passages of self-consciously lyrical prose, make it both easier and more difficult to read than Triomf. Significantly, given the growing prominence of Afrikaans women writers and their increasingly well-articulated insights into the relationship between race, gender and ...”