“... 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 ...”

“... any real happiness. There is some routine piety in this letter, as well as considerable effort at self-discipline. Kemble is assuring herself, as much as her correspondent, that she does not unduly depend on the applause of the crowd. But the evidence suggests that the anti-theatricality of this celebrated actress was not merely a pose, and that even when she ...”

“... Generalissimo’s diary is still one of the main sources for the Xi’an Incident, though it is self-serving and was probably redrafted. One of the difficulties of writing about him is the paucity of new material: there has been nothing comparable to the publication of Mao’s secret speeches or the revelations of his doctor. Biographers have always had a ...”

“... a human being’, but now he realised that the world was an illusion, and he learned to leave his self behind and inhabit a shadow existence. Before, he had written ‘mainly lyrical poetry’. Now he ‘discovered a strange and unique phenomenon: that words themselves acted like drops of liquid mercury splashing about, moving in any direction’. He called ...”

“... democracy – was invented by the Scots. The contingency of truth, the incoherence of the self, the limitations of Enlightenment: Hogg’s preoccupations are modern. His doubtful narratives – in which events are retold from multiple perspectives, and oral tradition confronts the authority of print – are innovative and influential. There is a case ...”

“... published) ‘Italian’ Symphony, and most of his other work. He had an unexpectedly Brahmsian self-critical anxiety when confronting tradition, and a perfectionism bordering on the censorious. His father, as Devrient noted, feared this latter quality would prevent him from finding a wife or an opera libretto, and though he secured the first he never ...”

“... to speak to Michael Finkel of the New York Times. Clinging onto the last vestiges of his old self, Finkel said it was he. The reporter from the Oregonian said that a man named Christian Longo, who appeared to have killed his wife and three children, was on the run in Mexico, posing as a journalist from the New York Times called Michael Finkel. One might ...”

“... withdraw from Palestinian territory illegally occupied since March (Israel’s excuse has been ‘self-defence’). Israel has refused to comply, but in this case the UN is to be ignored – ‘we’ understand that Israel must defend its citizens. Neologisms such as ‘anticipatory pre-emption’ and ‘preventive ...”

“... and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated.’ Happily for the government, General Galtieri was already planning his April invasion of the Falkland Islands. However, the idea that the indulgences of the 1960s were to blame for the pathologies of the 1980s had been ...”

“... were justifiable: he stole the food because his party was starving; the people he shot he shot in self-defence, or to forestall even larger massacres, or in the greater interest of ending the Arab slave trade. Third, if they might not have been strictly justified, they may nonetheless have been excusable, usually because of Stanley’s sufferings, either on ...”

“... and that despite the many occasions on which it has drawn condemnation – the granting of self-government to a whites-only regime; the exiling in 1950 of Seretse Khama, then the heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy and eventually the first president of Botswana, for marrying a white woman; the refusal to take a tougher line against apartheid – it has ...”

“... being representationally specific. At the same time his behaviour became more infantile, more self-consciously histrionic; at parties he danced and sang and cooked, built fires that were too big, drank too much and insulted people; at home he was more demanding and jealous and more prone to violent tantrums, less able to bear being thwarted or even ...”