“... Council) or act as a showcase for the country’s current trends, a publicity stunt, a forum for self-criticism, a curatorial opportunity. This year’s Kenyan exhibit was withdrawn after widespread criticism that its Italian curators had chosen more Chinese artists than Kenyan ones. The 32 rooms of Enwezor’s Palazzo Centrale are centred on Das Kapital ...”

“... subjects not citizens. This fixity of citizenship, its exclusivity, formed the hard core of their self-identification. To have two patriae, to be a Roman and also an Athenian, a Gaul or a Samaritan, was only made conceivable by the Romans, who created the only ancient culture that could see noble motives in those that opposed it: Romans ‘make a desolation ...”

“... Jia is a genre novelist, whose books have sold several million copies in China, and an assiduous self-publicist. When Mai Jia’s publisher told the press he would pay an advance of ten million yuan for his new novel, Whisper of the Wind, Mai Jia denied the story, denounced his publisher as a hype artist and so got double the exposure. The TV adaptation of ...”

“... Icelandic arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and ...”

“... thanks to Florence Nightingale – the Napoleonic Wars attract a breezier strain of self-congratulation. An emphasis on jolly seafaring tends to block out carnage, disfigurement and mangled limbs. The deaths of Nelson and Moore are remembered, but as moments of high-minded stoicism hardly stained by the spatter of blood. Uglow’s balanced ...”

“... in their efforts to keep left-wing ideas out of their publications, for ‘if some measure of self-policing (or self-discipline) is not instituted, their ostensible masters may be obliged to take a more active role in the management of those institutions which, nominally at any rate, are in their charge.’ The Daily ...”

“... profit and an indifference towards the desires of others behind a carapace of moral elevation and self-congratulation. There is another, less obvious anachronism. Christianity plays a strange role in writings about Roman history. Partly because of the way disciplinary specialisms work within the academy, and partly because of a residual commitment to a kind ...”

“... but insecure London. All That Man Is is a suite of nine moral stories (unconnected, but self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel) persuasively set in different milieux across a new, East-ish, un-glam, second-tier or easyJet Europe – not Athens, Barcelona, Paris and Rome, but Charleroi, Frankfurt-Hahn, Katowice, Larnaca ...”

“... the French story that it could have been nothing else. And Maurycy Szczucki, our unrelenting self-investigator, is propelled into new roles as accomplice, husband, useful idiot and prisoner, going from being an existential journeyman to a deep causal agent, lifting the lid on questions of love and loyalty as he goes. He may be a victim of the 20th ...”

“... which turns out to be something charitable, because that’s what posh people do when they attempt self-sacrifice. She is soon in the stews of Lambeth, writing and reading stories to poor children. We can only hope they are better than the Duchess of Sussex’s effort – or, indeed, Budgie the Little Helicopter, Fergie’s previous bid for literary ...”

“... Manion correctly point out that feminist and lesbian scholars long disregarded or downplayed the self-definitions of people who had spent their lives insisting they were not women. Mesch cites Rachilde’s assertion that they were ‘not a feminist’ because they were ‘not a woman’. But the zeal with which Mesch and Manion take those scholars to task ...”

“... is present from the moment the first of the protagonists, Justine, goes for an early-morning run: self-vaunting about her fitness, she turns out to have a heart murmur, ‘like a fish flopping’, and has been told never to go running alone. As the hours pass and each character in turn steps centre-stage, tensions build. Everyone’s worried about ...”

“... her friend E.R. Braithwaite, the author of To Sir, with Love (1959), a catalyst for her own later self-reckoning in Black Teacher. When she began to look for a teaching post, Gilroy was frustrated at every turn, the target of a widespread suspicion founded in an ignorance that could be described as folkloric were the baiting about cannibalism and washing not ...”

“... writers’ tumultuous, if somewhat bland, romantic travails and other difficulties (depression, self-harm, social ostracism, fainting spells, being broke, bad dads). Yet they affect the central storylines. Connell’s acceptance to NYU occasions a break with Marianne, who says, ‘I’m sure you could get funding’; Frances’s use of material from ...”

“... of scientific objectivity’. For too long, Felski suggests, critics have clung to ideals of ‘self-effacement and willed impersonality’. This approach – which ‘screens out any flicker of emotion, tamps down idiosyncratic impulses and steers clear of the first-person voice’ – contributes, in her view, to the clipped and colourless nature of much ...”