“... presences. In Edward, on the other hand, the Major repeatedly sees traces of a mildness and self-mockery ‘that did not go at all with his leonine features’. When a party of Oxford undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into ...”

“... agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will somehow sweep the field. If the lining isn’t the point of this garment, then how does it drape, how is it cut and shaped? Lost for Words is a curious production, both off-the-peg and strangely ...”

“... producers and translators. ‘I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation,’ he wrote in 1958 to Barney Rosset, his New York publisher, ‘and that it would be really better to stop altogether than to go on with that.’ In some ways, success had a calming effect on Beckett, whose experiences during the Occupation ...”

“... described as ‘more hawkish’ than most Democrats, and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who ...”

“... to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.In these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The ...”

“... interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or ...”

“... engagement with their precursors. By ‘great labour’ Eliot appears to have in mind intense self-directed study, such as Milton’s five-year ‘studious retirement’ in his twenties. The goal Eliot envisions is to absorb your precursors so thoroughly that they speak in and through your work. This is not ...”

“... his high-wire act of slumming it with socially unavowable desires while lording it with his social self-image: Charlus skates on ice, dangerously but also skilfully, though beneath the ice madness always threatens (‘madman’ recurs as a description of him in this mood). But if anachronistic ‘camping’ of the text can produce misreadings, all is forgiven ...”

“... departments in the less disciplined disciplines, and marginal to society as a whole: the self-absorption of the guild and its detachment from social reality may be gauged by the occasionally overheard reflection that literary theory, as practised by expensive pedagogues in universities of the affluent West, is a ‘revolutionary’ act. Rousseau’s ...”

“... of a male hierarchy, spends the novel lamenting his lot as the perennial victim of women who are self-centred, bossy, exploitative and vengeful. Amis’s subject is not man’s objective hold on power in our times, but his morale; tougher-minded women readers are going to feel gratified rather than insulted by Stanley’s witness, because he is delightfully ...”

“... notion of ‘capital in general’, or his speculative belief that history was a vehicle for the self-realisation of humanity. The latter notion was derived from Hegel. Like Hegel, Marx offered a logically incoherent view of history, a half-way house between a fully religious theory and a fully secularised theory. For both, history was the embodiment of ...”

“... Stoker himself would have learned of the bizarre practice of which Count Dracula’s sanguinary self-medication is a grand guignol variant – the systematic consumption of human tissue for therapeutic purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and ...”

“... unproblematic also makes one wonder how much these strikes contribute to America’s collective self-defence. Elaborating on these doubts, Mazzetti adds that ‘American missions were often based on shards of intelligence from unreliable sources,’ especially ‘unreliable foreign intelligence services’ who routinely approach their American counterparts ...”

“... cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger and self-disgust, aware that something is missing but unsure exactly what it is.’The utter desolation of this cycling was seen again recently, when West – the man who righteously derailed a charity telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ...”

“... blame it on the EU, and begin storytelling. Abstract principles such as the right to cultural self-determination for minority peoples are there to lend lustre to your defence of your own people, not to help you identify the complaints of your people with the complaints of others, because that’s what they are: others. The Brexiteers’ opponents, the ...”