“... 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 ...”

“... he is permanently marooned among the savages. Tom Brodzinski, the protagonist or victim of Will Self’s satirical nightmare The Butt, meets a comparable fate. On holiday on an imaginary post-colonial island continent, Tom decides to give up smoking, and, distracted by the sense that for once he is ‘Doing the Right Thing’, flicks his final fag-end from ...”

“... One could even, metaphorically, call it an ‘explorer’ narrative, for it is partly a work of self-exploration. It seems to help, though, if we narrow our definition of ‘travel book’ or ‘travel writing’ so as to exclude real and literal explorer narratives – such a book, shall we say, as Mungo Park’s Travels. It is a memorable book, but Park ...”

“... 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 ...”