“... 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 ...”

“... options to justify going to war in Iraq. They could argue that they were acting against Iraq in self-defence. But plainly they weren’t. They could argue there was a humanitarian crisis looming. There wasn’t. The only remaining way to go to war legally was to get Security Council authorisation. Greenstock found the possibility that the Americans would ...”

“... to be selling. The Democrats made the mistake of assuming that his vulgarity and ignorance were self-evident: the voters had only to see them to know he was unfit for the presidency. This year, they made the same mistake, and they came eerily close to a second disaster. Biden-Harris lost Florida, where they could have clinched a victory early on election ...”

“... school experience a nightmare. He’d left school at thirteen and embarked on a life of unofficial self-employment, beginning with a surprisingly popular line in repairing sash window cords door-to-door; later, he ran a garage out of a London squat. My brother, fourteen years older than me, also found himself out of the school system early, ultimately leaving ...”

“... the offices of Cauce, the story becomes fact: ‘I’m not imagining that part; I read it.’This self-consciousness leads Fernández to devise a series of analogies – from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than ...”

“... where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought. There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of solid wellbeing’ in this intermission between agricultural slumps. The primary concern of a large tenant ...”

“... prince is looking for a princess. His ageing mother clearly won’t do for the part. Blinkered by self-absorption, he is not prepared to notice on his return form Paris signs of the heart disease which abruptly ends Mrs Percy’s patient life. Lewis is devastated, and bewildered. His educated idealism has not adapted him for domesticity and grief. ‘Life ...”