“... who manhandles both the world and other people: Audrey Litvinoff in The Believers – abrasive, self-deceiving, mordant, furious. The novel opens in 1962, at a party in London, where 19-year-old Audrey Howard, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a secretary with an angry reserve and a nearly crushing sense of her own ignorance, watches Joel ...”

“... appropriately snowy image. He imagines himself as an intrepid Arctic explorer, but this parallel self is still too active, and soon the narrator is a statue, stuck in shit. That there are two ways of describing the moment suggests that Zeller has something deeper in mind. Will metaphors do instead of action? Are they just pretentious? Can any description ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cry in anticipation of a whipping is shameful, as it reveals that the dog has ‘no honour and no self-discipline’. By this point, I was cringing at the images and feeling ashamed myself, unable to rescue the dog or punch Mann. A climax of dog-inspired shame is to be found in a documentary by Ulrich Seidel who, in the style of reality TV, filmed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory accounts of diplomats, who always believe they are closer to the workings of power than they really are – has been vigorously challenged by any number of historians.Hunting the Falcon is written as though it’s indisputable that the rise ...”

“... cries out, again and again, ‘I didn’t! I swear I didn’t,’ before her protests give way to self-doubt and depression. ‘I suppose I must have.’ Each time she gives in, Gregory’s face flashes with something like arousal. ‘Yes. YES,’ he says. ‘That’s right: you’re imagining things.’Gregory’s chief motivation isn’t sadism but ...”

“... Renata seems less a character based on a person than a projection of the narrator’s own self-hatred, the two representing a psychic split in which both ageing wife and ugly stepdaughter are duelling aspects of the same person. Similarly, the women in The Fate of Mary Rose (written five years later) are slippery projections of the narrator, a ...”

“... contesting ‘conventional monikers of left and right’. Diagonalists, in this typology, mostly self-identify as middle-class and are disproportionately self-employed. Klein is particularly interested in the wellness-anti-vaxxer connection, which she thinks is partly to do with all the yoga teachers going bust over ...”

“... Badar (‘an ex-houseboy turned flunky in a small hotel’) and Karim (a ‘lanky, soft-spoken, self-possessed’ civil servant) there’s Karim’s wife, Fauzia (a ‘composed and tranquil’ teacher and ‘book rat’). For a time, after the non-theft episode, the trio live together. Their struggles are those common to many young people: how to make a ...”