“... easily findable on YouTube. ‘What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with ...”

“... found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.Frame and Sargeson read ...”

“... of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in all British colonies. His plan got little local support. Few Chinese businessmen saw any need to share even municipal government with rickshaw-pullers. Hong Kong’s British (mostly Scottish) tycoons have never lost their ...”

“... a class by themselves in the history of artificial life: the first solo free-walking self-propelled androids’. The other figures offer variations on the monk’s theme. One is a lay brother worrying a tiny beaded rosary; another a bearded saint crowned by a halo, with a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and ...”

“... have a mind of his own, and a more creative and productive mind than Jonas’s phlegmatic waking self. The night work of the title is what Jonas watches on subsequent tapes, with ever-increasing horror: the figure on the screen laughs, screams like an animal, wields a knife dangerously close to his throat and trots off to the bathroom to pull an infected ...”

“... to Nero, in which the emperor’s absolute power of life and death is supposed to encourage self-restraint. (One assumes Seneca eventually realised just how badly he had miscalculated.) In dramatic terms, the play sides with Nero’s view of the Augustan principate rather than Seneca’s: Nero’s description of the butchery carried out by Octavian and ...”

“... Uncle Sam teaching an infant Cuba how to ride a bike: a symbol of ‘freedom and liberty, self-possession and self-control’. The US military occupation of Cuba began on 1 January 1899, 60 years to the day before Che Guevara led a ragtag band of guerrillas into the streets of Havana. The decades in between saw an ...”

“... bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t.’ Nawab’s failure to transcend his self-interest, in the moment of the other man’s death, coexists with his resilience, which allows him to survive, makes him what he is. ‘Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.’ There’s no ...”

“... back at the hospital, I sat on the wards and held patients’ hands, chatting with whatever self they were that day. It seemed as good a use of my time as any. Our hospital had once been a workhouse and some patients still thought it was. It was an easy place in which to lose the will to live. About once a fortnight I would get away after lunch, and ...”

“... occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the victims’ performance on the throne that they stood aside and ...”

“... as Feathers’s does. He administers the same law, but handles the insignia of their class more self-consciously, as if he can’t afford to be as casual as Feathers (whose gruff self-forged savoir faire is reminiscent sometimes of Tietjens’s in Ford’s Parade’s End). Veneering’s voice makes Feathers ...”

“... childhood, we see a world of enchanted, stationary time, where everything conspires to protect the self and the community against threats to calm and wellbeing. The very place is a trope aimed at the horrors of noisy Romanticism: ‘There is no sea, no tall mountains, cliffs or chasms, no slumberous forests – nothing grandiose, wild, and gloomy.’ ‘No ...”

“... Britain”’ prevails, the arc will have to go its own way, leaving the centre to its English self. Britannophiles insist this is a backward step, a return to the age of nationalism rather than an emergence from it. Of course it is. But it is one forced on the periphery by central failure: by the Brownite determination to conserve an archaic ...”

“... aged 57, in 1977. The Brazilian writer and her characters had always been close, and it seems that self and creation had finally merged in her mind. Others had already made the connection. After she left her husband in 1959, he poured out his regrets to her in a letter that addressed her as both of the women in her first novel – the untamed, amoral Joana and ...”

“... styles were adopted unknowingly by their producers and consumers. During the 1970s irony and self-consciousness began for the first time significantly to shape the behaviour of both groups. In 1971 … even Vogue asked if bad taste was a bad thing. The following year, magazine-of-the-moment Nova … coaxed readers to ‘let your bad taste out for an ...”