“... 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 ...”

“... the social obligations of the nobility; the compromises of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fatal self-obsession of the Budapest Parliament, the in-fighting of the political parties, the need for peaceful intervention in the Balkans; the social politics of the hunt, the latest fashions in dress and in shooting, the Hungarian predilection for all things French ...”

“... another man he marries a woman he doesn’t love and goes into exile on Cape Wrath. His bitter self-denial sows the seeds of his monstrous double life: after meeting Molly again in London by chance, he spends two months every year with her. Silver’s search for a story – and an identity – ends up with this Victorian melodrama at its centre. In her ...”

“... as opponents. His first book on the subject, Policing Shanghai 1927-37 (1995), described the self-subverting involvement of the new Kuomintang government’s municipal police bureau in both the opium trade and the civil war against the Communists. The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime 1937-41 (1996) carried the story into the period of ...”

“... But his most potent influence lay in his reconfiguring of the domestic ideal. The concept of a self-contained suburban home, with a spacious garden and accommodation laid out without physical divisions between the resident family and its servants, had its origins in Pugin’s work. Such a house, as Pugin envisaged it, must function as a coherent ...”

“... repertoire of tricks and mannerisms that were ‘almost caricatures, some of them, of his natural self’, rather than expressions of the character he was playing. He was, in short, a ham, and a self-centred one at that. (When Ellen Terry suggested that she might defy convention and wear black rather than white in ...”

“... 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 ...”