“... features such as carriage-lamps or stone lions, often having more to do with the resident’s self-image than with the architecture. Grandeur has its obligations: if your three epigraphs are from Antigone, Bunyan (Grace Abounding) and Goethe (Faust Part Two), you’d better follow through with something formidable – as Under the Volcano does. Joseph ...”

“... own trash, was overrun with rich tech people who defied the festival’s precious tenet of radical self-reliance with their over-reliance on paid staff. Burning Man, which started in 1986 when twenty people burned an effigy on a beach, was turning into a dusty version of Davos. Old-timers lamented the rise of ‘plug and play’ culture. There were too many ...”

“... Murakami isn’t proud of them.) It uses the voice of a disgruntled, detached Tokyo hipster, self-raised on Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky, to tell an unlikely noir story: a nameless Boku goes in search of an old friend and a mysterious sheep on the orders of a shadowy tycoon. It’s a consciously Chandleresque set-up, which, in ...”

“... intensified and projected onto a global stage, is in Dower’s view either delusional or cynically self-serving. It led to the launch of a war on ‘evil’ under the sign of humanitarianism and with the assumed imprimatur of God – biblical quotations, mostly from Old Testament prophets, appeared on Bush’s briefing papers during Operation Iraqi ...”

“... renouncing them. ‘A deacon I was and deacon I must remain.’ He later told Carlyle: ‘My own self … was falling to wreck when I first came to know you.’ Carlyle gave him something to believe in and do, because Carlyle believed that divine revelation wasn’t in scripture but in providence. Writing history was therefore a sacramental act, a means to ...”

“... particularly nationalist – he just thinks it’s more democratic for countries to be small and self-governing, and the geography of Scotland makes a ‘national container’ of a handy size. And Scotland doesn’t even make for a self-identical container, such as a bowl: it’s a ‘cluster of islands’ – or city ...”

“... and formal procedures, reading resolutions and exegeses that explained, in the characteristic self-satisfied tone of Soviet bureaucratic documentation, that the wise decisions of the Party’s Central Committee and Council of Ministers had been duly disseminated, hailed by the public, and implemented. At the same time, he was making friends in ...”

“... looking for here was not the ridiculous but the criminal’. And finally, to return to the sunny, self-rescuing Camus, our murderer resents ‘the insolent certainty’ of the process that will lead to his death, the absence of pardon or appeal or escape, ‘the ridiculous disproportion between the judgment at the basis of it and its imperturbable unfolding ...”

“... third novel, his fourth book when you include the Tintin one, and part of an ambitious self-managed campaign that also includes propaganda, film (he wrote the story, adapted from Borges, told in Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take), and conceptual artworks, the latter largely from his position as general secretary of the International Necronautical ...”

“... sake of freedom. Again, the distribution of income and wealth that the market produced was neither self-evidently fair nor always socially beneficial. If the distribution became too unequal, or damaged society in other ways, government had to intervene. There was nothing intrinsically valuable in the market itself. In an agenda-setting speech, delivered at the ...”

“... the life of the prophet – violent, intolerant, misogynistic – that Muslims were incapable of self-rule. ‘These days, I am a little disturbed,’ the Mughal aristocrat Sir Syed Ahmad Khan wrote in his diary in the summer of 1869. ‘I am reading Muir sahib’s book … It has burned my heart.’ A founding father of Islamic modernism, which attempted to ...”

“... Hergé, and in his occasional essays, his posture comes across as a faintly parodic version of a self-assured young lecturer’s. The audience is projected as being essentially onside – agreeing it’s ‘a little disappointing’ that J.G. Ballard wasn’t fully down with the programme, or ‘snickering’ along with the speaker at ‘the words ...”

“... turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful, but either ...”

“... for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky devil, who fell down a flight of stairs when he was three and ...”

“... dignities, stuffs, individualities. Sleep in Courbet is the opposite of death’s second self. It is warmth, deep breathing, restless dreamwork, post-coital flush. Ogling Courbet’s two lesbians in Sleep, and then laying an optical hand on the pubic hair and peeping clitoris in The Origin of the World, I thought suddenly of the lines in ...”