“... of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring. One arrow points in, the ...”

“... might properly alienate readers only slightly attracted to the lure of the Master. But the self-consciousness is here calculated. Isabel is a heroine in triplicate. She has just walked into a novel; she thinks of herself in heroic terms; and a group of gazers – or readers – watchful as a Greek chorus but endowed with greater agency, seems to have ...”

“... Europe’s cathedrals. Bolaño is plainly sympathetic to this frightened old man caught between self-justification and remorse, but gives him his comeuppance all the same: ‘And then the storm of shit begins.’ On the other side – the side of revolution, disorder and failure – are Bolaño’s (anti-)heroes. From the first paragraph of the story ...”

“... a shared future. In a matter of moments Mother has moved from oblique manipulation with a hint of self-pity – ‘Would I ever be allowed to meet her?’, forcing the desperately evasive answer ‘I’m sure she’d love to meet you’ – to winkling out the secret of the ring. Jay’s blunder is highly consequential. Mother is indiscreet, or rather her ...”

“... of anonymous letters. Despite all of this, Mr Justice Avory was not convinced that the slender, self-possessed woman in front of him was capable of writing such a letter. The Brighton Argus reported that he directed the jury to ‘consider whether it was conceivable that she could have written this document’ given that her ‘demeanour in the witness box ...”

“... new book takes its title from a passage in Aurora Leigh where Romney patronises the almost self-taught Aurora for writing ‘lady’s Greek,/Without the accents’. This is just the start of a complaint about women who want to be clever and poetical when they should be supporting men who are trying to improve the world: ‘Work man, work woman, since ...”

“... evidently Morel belongs to the ranks of ‘misanthropes and atheists’. The governor, a self-proclaimed republican humanist, suspects Morel of misanthropy too: ‘That fellow is trying to tell us what he thinks of us, to show his scorn for humanity, and he uses elephants as a means of expression, that’s all.’ Or perhaps elephants are ‘a mere ...”

“... he wrote to Hanns Skolle, a painter whom he had befriended in the Library in New York. ‘My self-analysis is becoming self-laceration; my failures call for such ardent criticism (and get it) that I am in a fair way . . . to what?’ He returned to the United States a few months later, and tried again to write. The ...”

“... dining room table.’ The Moomins would add you, however strange and ungainly your inner or outer self, to their table, without question.I would never wish to do without the power of the orphan story, however. It has a burning warmth and clarity to it. It matters to us all, because we all become orphans in the end. The orphan story has traditionally offered a ...”

“... by companies in issuing shares to their workers (the first such was in the city of Lvov, now a self-proclaimed ‘free’ city run by a council dominated by the Ukrainian independence movement Rukh). These experiments have allowed enterprises access to extra capital, drawn resources away from the sock under the bed (the 2 per cent interest at the state ...”

“... investigative gaze; incidents lose their epic character; idols turn out to have feet of clay. The self-improving ethos, and with it the grand narrative of what Hudson refers to insistently as ‘the raising of the Working Class’, has disappeared without a trace (we are twice told that there is not a single bookshop in East Durham, only the paperback shelf ...”

“... three – half an hour before it was time to go … and say out loud, looking very serious and self-important, “Mademoiselle, can I go, please? I’ve got to go and suck my sister.”’ ‘Merciful heavens! Suck her sister?’ ‘Yes. Just imagine, her married sister, who was weaning a child, had too much milk and her breasts hurt her. She pretended ...”

“... cleansing’. The aim of Pol Pot’s revolution was a pure-blood and almost entirely rural, self-sufficient Khmer nation-state The shadow cast across history by the retreating peasantry is generally much longer and deeper than most analyses have acknowledged. And in Cambodia, certain exceptional circumstances let it attain for four years to an ...”

“... especially its last two decades, has usually been remembered as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor ...”

“... and flighty (‘Poem as equity release – whatever that is’), as well as frequent notes to self about this poem in particular, as in its opening line: ‘Rehearse the autopsy. Psyche cut as ever. Not clever. Cute, my arse.’ That opening line is a crash course in a voice the reader is going to have to get used to (I was about to write ‘going to have ...”