“... 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 ...”

“... borough, and many of them are young Bangladeshi men. These guys are Cockneys by geography and in self-image too. Walls and bus shelters are daubed with gang names – the Brick Lane Massive, Cannon Street Posse, Stepney Green Posse and the Shadwell Crew – that recall how, long before the Krays and the Richardsons, long before Jewish boxers like Jackie Berg ...”

“... saw the Orient and its unbroken past as a foundation, a point of origin, and a parameter for the self and for creativity; there is no ‘Orient’, or ‘East’, for the medieval poets Chandidas, Vidyapati or Jayadeva, as there is, so profoundly, for Tagore. Nor would it have occurred to Chandidas to locate himself in history, and to claim and create ...”

“... of life found themselves under attack from the barren counter-energies of rationalism. His poetry self-consciously opposes what he once called, sounding just like Lawrence, ‘this rotten English civilisation’. In his most revealing interviews, conducted by the critic Ekbert Faas in the 1970s, he spoke with an angry prophetic vehemence about ‘the ...”

“... the first non-royal celebrity to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ...”

“... from his vast reading in English and several other languages into verse that seems effortlessly self-sufficient and sublime – verse that appears to transcend sources, borrowings, allusions, other than the clearly Biblical. Noting that no writer before Milton had fashioned himself ‘quite so self-consciously’ as an ...”

“... Power summarises her dispiriting conclusion this way: ‘Unless another country acts for self-interested reasons, as was the case when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, or armed members of the victim group manage to fight back and win, as Tutsi rebels did in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of genocide have usually retained power.’ But what about ...”

“... vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such self-confidence has dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of ...”