“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”