“... person with the power is always the one who cares less.’ There are countless other examples of self-repetition. One for My Baby appears to have been untouched by any editorial hand, or at least by an editorial hand that had also bothered to pick up Man and Boy. There is even one scene of sexual congress – a crucial plot point, as Parsons’s manuals ...”

“... a fictional cast of mind, a willingness to make yourself up as you go along, to score out the old self and start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality ...”

“... version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases, patter and multiple personalities. The old comics were human, of course, but the startling thing about the newer television cartoon characters is that they often appear more human than real people, more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... meet him in the lobby of one of the big hotels, or in his office above a coffee bar – a tall, self-deprecatingly dashing figure with high cheekbones and exquisite shirts. He is brilliant, charming and droll, and his presence works like air-conditioning on the perspiration and stench of Thai politics. Over the course of an hour with Korn, it resolves into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... steaming towards Gallipoli – and had a lot to do with Brooke’s apotheosis as a poster-boy for self-sacrifice: Churchill’s threnody on his ‘classic symmetry of mind and body’ etc. As both Georgian and civil servant, Marsh had no problem with those who, as the New Statesman soon put it, pictured Brooke as a ‘blend of General Gordon and Lord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Vegetarians, we say,​ are self-righteous and humourless; or fussy and weird; or like Hitler; we say that their diet makes them anaemic; that having to cater for them ruins every dinner party; that they are crazy not to eat bacon/lamb shanks/pepperoni because we evolved as hunter-gatherers; that their food smells horrible, and by implication, so do they; that it’s cruel to bring up a child vegetarian; that they are hypocrites, because how can they pretend to care about animal suffering when they still buy clothes from normal shops – and are those leather shoes by any chance? Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia – where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted – but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was ‘indigenisation’. Ukrainian culture and language were revived, and rights to healthcare, education and social security ...”

“... from which important poetry proceeds.’ It was the work of Edward Thomas, like Spencer a profound self-doubter, that suggested how he might move away from the urgent, gnomic compressions of Wystan the Wunderkind. ‘In what sense am I joining in?’ he asks in the opening poem of Aegean Islands, ‘Allotments: April’; it is Spencer’s sense of being at an ...”

“... themselves that Hitler’s Germany was a place where the Prussian virtues of fairness and self-restraint could still flourish, and who discovered their mistake too late. About the exiles for whom the East Prussia they lost but still see in dreams continues to exist on a plane beyond reality. But it is also about what did happen in this ...”