“... with their arrogance and their aggressiveness, their contempt for the rest of us, their supreme self-satisfaction and self-confidence. The last of this species – Zola’s Octave (inventor of the first department store) and Maupassant’s ‘bel ami’ – still marry into money, but finally trace a route for their ...”

“... something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media platforms, disrupted the democratic arena ...”

“... Statistics. Jobs are characterised according to their employment relations. Employers, the self-employed and employees are differentiated, with the last (and much the largest) group subdivided according to contractual status. Zero-hours contracts are an extreme case of the commodification of labour already implicit in working for a wage; salaried ...”

“... to the breakdown of the marriage she’d been in since 1997, with the tall and saturnine Will Self? ‘I started being treated in October for a mental illness I hadn’t even heard of: complex post-traumatic stress disorder … It comes about when you suppress traumas and carry on regardless … You thrum with stress.’A couple of weeks after that was ...”

“... border: in Tell Me How It Ends, the confident posture of nonfiction; in Lost Children Archive, the self-conscious narrator who mistrusts the possibility of representation. In both books, not only can Luiselli not tell us how it ends, but she resists telling us what to think. And yet her fictional narrator does have a goal for her own storytelling: ‘Helping ...”

“... reckon with. In an elegantly succinct chapter on the films, Arsenjuk anatomises their dialectical self-division between an ‘epic-heroic’ and a ‘theatrical-grotesque’ mode: on one hand, the epochal pathos and ecstasy of the dictatorship of the proletariat; on the other, a wily guerrilla tactic of explosion, caricature and Grand Guignol. Further ...”

“... deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, his approach had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an ...”

“... that this reveals – in the face of misadventures that would have sunk most such zealous self-promoters – would alone merit a careful investigation of how Alcibiades worked his magic. The number of those seemingly taken in by him, beginning with Thucydides and including various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place ...”

“... fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet. Ellis’s most successful satire was self-satire: Lunar Park, a postmodern haunted house novel filled with post 9/11 dreads, in-jokes and autobiographical notes, with Jay and Bret themselves futzing around as doofus sidekicks. An uncharacteristically companionable novel from Mr Trendy Sicko, it also ...”

“... stuff gets lost along the way – including, perhaps, the main thing that makes this magnificently self-indulgent cetological feast so delicious. Whaling could produce a great novel because it’s an activity in which a lot of what are now distinct arts and sciences messily converge. Hunting meets marine biology meets global economics meets geography meets ...”

“... of the newborn’s mother removes her wishes and concerns entirely from the equation – hardly self-evident assumptions from many moral perspectives. And this raises the general difficulty of separating the value-neutral facts of a case from the moral intuitions we are supposed to bring to bear on it. If our differing intuitions lead us to contest more or ...”

“... There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit ...”

“... through the promise of free exploration and rebirth, to the blank acceptance or celebration of self-extinction. In the act of ‘discovering America’, Conrad tells us in the introductory chapter, these writers were really ‘discovering’ themselves. And yet all of them were known to be what they were, for good or ill, before they got there. What really ...”

“... claims about the ample scope of phenomena about which they can say something wise-sounding and self-consistent. The relevant question should be, not whether the favoured theory can ‘cover’ a given phenomenon, but whether it provides us with the most plausible of competing explanations. To make such a case, it is of course necessary to weigh one’s own ...”

“... a literary activity: it was a weapon. Physically, he was small and unremarkable. Socially, he was self-conscious about his background. In one of the many letters to Nancy Mitford printed here, he says he had never realised that he was not a gentleman until it had been pointed out to him by Lady Burghclere, his first mother-in-law. The tone is ironic – but ...”