“... someone who has versified the 150th anniversary of Rochdale’s Co-Operative Society – is its self-imposed length. It is one thing to write a numerically regular poem like the brilliant but brief ‘Ten Pence Story’ (ten-syllable lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s ...”

“... language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in England, Eliot liked to sign himself metoikos (‘resident alien’) in letters to journals, and was still calling himself a ‘spirit unappeased and peregrine’ by the time we get to ‘Little Gidding’, as if plain old ...”

“... where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an improvised affair. The British delegation’s composition and logistics had been calculated well in advance and to the finest detail by the Permanent Under-Secretary of the ...”

“... impressing the boy with a sense of the importance of his new name and, consequently, his new self: ‘All that school year I felt as if I had been chosen, and although, as I also knew, such a belief in no way matched my uncertain status, I have held fast to it almost my whole life.’ He spends most of his life, however, in ignorance of his ‘real ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dramatises, sometimes ostentatiously, the profound obstacles to communication – the wall between self and other, the rattle of consciousness – that confront everyone: ‘I remembered mishearing Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus as a child. Barnamum Bailey. Like Osmium, Cardamom, Brainium, Barnamum, Where’smymom … Not now, I begged my Tourette’s ...”