“... years earlier. Whenever the date appears in his narrative, which is often, Paul becomes trapped in self-pity about the unfair burden it has placed on him. Politically charged birthdays run through Grass’s fiction: Walter Matern in Dog Years, for example, shares his date of birth with Hitler. In fact, Im Krebsgang continues the history told in the ‘Love ...”

“... and ‘The Hunters’ (published together with ‘A Simple Tale’) verge on the baroque. Their self-revising clauses, their self-conscious search for the right word, would be excessive were they not so well suited to their protagonists: graduate students reflecting on their childhoods and literature professors slowly ...”

“... Manners is in many ways a very different character from William Beckwith: older, fatter, less self-assured, from a less exalted social class, he’s also a terrible swimmer. Yet they have in common not only a large libido, a finely tuned aesthetic sense and an enviable way with words, but a certain emotional distance from other people, a not uncruel ...”

“... His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of ‘character armour’ and ‘self-regulation’. Reich, in turn, saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son to Summerhill for a while. He once threatened to give up his research and come and teach at the school, but Neill laughed and declined his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in a paper published in 2015. These deaths are the result of self-inflicted violence, either suicides or drug and alcohol overdoses (‘poisonings’ in the language of the report), particularly affecting white Americans living in the parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Trump – the South, the ...”

“... a place to which people have been running for years, whether to escape or to find some invented self. After the reading I took questions. Then the moderator announced that there was time for only one more question. A woman, who had been standing the whole time at the end of the large room, with her back to the wall, spoke. ‘I am Syrian,’ she said. ‘I ...”

“... of invisible boundaries recurs later in the book, this time in a different key. Frank, even in his self-imposed exile, remains attached to the rituals of suburban masculinity, chief among them the keeping of an immaculate garden. He’s frustrated by a persistent bald spot on the lawn and fences it off, scolding their dog whenever she gets too ...”

“... in the Maghreb. One device in the novel misfires: Gaddafi has an attachment to Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear. Khadra introduces this early on, in order to set up an unsuccessful parting shot: the dying rais remembers his mother telling him, when he was a boy, that he was deaf to reason in one ear, while the other listened only to ...”

“... Artemidorus wrote, ‘is a sign that our spirit admonishes and foretells us affectionately the self same thing worthy to be thought upon.’ I appreciate the gentleness of that ‘affectionately’; some of my own consultations become shared reflections on what recurring dreams might mean. A patient with a recurring bad dream may choose to suppress it ...”

“... to offer. The US was caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, as a proud promoter of self-determination, it wished to identify itself with anti-colonialism. On the other, it felt obliged to show solidarity with Britain, which was the archetypal imperial power and a valued partner in the Cold War. In attempting to satisfy both requirements, the US ...”

“... black silk doublet, an outfit pegged somewhere between modesty and ostentation. He fixes us with a self-assured gaze; there is the trace of a smile. He holds a pair of soft gloves; a later portrait, in which he looks more like a courtier, has him clasping a purse, suggesting the precariousness of riches as much as their importance. Analysis of this second ...”

“... means absolute – tendency to increased brain size, more flexible behaviour, an enlarged sense of self, and autobiographical memory. Bigger brains require larger skulls, more easily balanced by being placed on the top of the body, favouring an upright posture with no need for a tail as a counterbalance. So the evolution of humanoid creatures could perhaps ...”

“... Nietzsche thought had vanished from the earth.’ It is a stirring peroration and one whose self-declared ‘pessimism’ and sober wisdom read all the more persuasively in the light of public events, seven years on from the essay’s initial appearance in New Left Review. If – once again – I call its direction of travel ‘odd’, it is because I ...”