“... values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality TV – abject self-exposure from which we just can’t look away? Or perhaps, Clune suggests, people liken My Struggle to a drug because reading it can feel like consuming vast quantities of essentially undifferentiated material: all crack is the same, you just want more and ...”

“... But Lawrence wasn’t all that interested in ur-versions of his poems: the more he threw off self-censorship, and the set forms and other tasteful packaging which came with it, the more he wanted the poems to feel like drafts. If free verse meant ‘there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished’ then his poems’ artistic quality would lie ...”

“... of the company were situated – which portrayed Fox as an Oriental despot. The blatantly self-serving enormities of the East India Bill brought about the defeat of the measure and the downfall of the coalition by the end of 1783. Behind the scenes George III put pressure on MPs to reject the bill, but the overthrow of the unnatural coalition was ...”

“... Holocaust, except that Urwand’s villains are Hitler’s willing Jewish dupes, or perhaps even self-hating quislings. Where Hollywood and Hitler discusses the ways that Nazi Germany was represented (or not) in American newsreels and independent films, as well as the fate of German movies in the US, The Collaboration is more narrowly ...”

“... with whom one may do as one wants – in every form of engagement, from tender care to sadistic self-pleasuring. A doll will not bite, will not let rip with her tongue. Rilke describes this ideal complicity in ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’, an impassioned and influential essay about dolls: ‘made into a confidant, an accomplice, like a dog, but ...”

“... the Tudor law courts, which he certainly exploited with enthusiasm in perennial litigation, as any self-respecting Elizabethan gentleman would. It is symbolic of a certain insularity in Byrd that he owned this peculiarly English legal text while his inept word-setting in his one Italian song reveals that he had no idea how that language was spoken. And he ...”

“... of that period, chances are that it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I cringed for my former self when I saw Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation again. Everything about it was wrong, from the opening shots of crumbling plaster and dim lightbulbs in the stairwell of a Prague tenement (three of Kundera’s bugbears in The Art of the Novel are ...”

“... Its main city is Qamishli, which feels a long way from the war. This is a fertile and largely self-sufficient region of wheat fields and oil wells, though few are still operating. Further west is the canton that surrounds the devastated town of Kobani, which Islamic State failed to capture despite a four-and-a-half-month siege that ended in January when ...”

“... the war, and did not lose the war … who had never heard of these lugubrious poets … with their self-pitying introversion? The fundamental argument advanced by Lewis, Carrington and others was that although they acknowledged the horror of the Western Front and recoiled from the misery it inflicted, they rejected the view it was either an intolerable ...”

“... money than other people’s students; anyone, indeed, who has sniffed the odours of intellectual self-interest and material poverty that can drift through the corridors of even the best-regulated modern university, will find much to welcome in Turner’s argument. But is it true? The tiny bit of philologist in me is tempted to situate what Turner says in its ...”

“... fire on intellectual elitism because the elite wouldn’t have him. But it is the case that the self-assurance, the ‘sense of infallibility’ and moral righteousness, that even Tawney’s friends thought his greatest strength and greatest limitation, would now be exercised both within and aslant England’s governing elite. And that had ...”

“... they wanted out of life, and how they should behave towards other people, in order to generate self-respect as well as respect from others. That respect included approval from the priestly caste of a religion which had started out a thousand years before by saying a great deal about love and forgiveness, and which early on had experienced some difficulty ...”

“... 1934, Hitler has been chancellor for a year, and Heidegger is beginning to take stock. There is no self-doubt here: ‘For years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped ...”

“... that other’s; make yourselves friends by means of the riches of iniquity, for the wealth of the self is the health of the self exchanged.A series of poetic dramas – about the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, about Satan’s attempt to father a child, about the personification of Chelmsford – offer opaque allegories of ...”

“... than Mustafa Barzani. It’s the predicament of smaller nations that they must bestow (calculated, self-interested) love on their supposed protectors but rarely see it reciprocated. When things begin to unravel it’s always the weaker side that loses. The year was 1975, and the agreement to which Barzani refers was an accord that the shah of Iran had just ...”