“... description follows seductively from there: ‘She was wearing blue, or so I imagine it. Her blue self settled in the grey folds of his brain, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.’ On the surface, they are two servants meeting in the lobby of a hotel; but in the language, in the imagining of the scene, they are wonderful. It’s mythology. The ...”

“... like tents, and journeys beginning to the new camping grounds of sickness, disability, loss of self. In the next bay I hear a man – a son perhaps, himself elderly – talking to an older woman: their voices cultured, civil, tired, the voices of people who’ve had their time. ‘You’ll have to go to residential now,’ he says. ‘To that place we ...”

“... with some 15 million Britons enjoying a week away from home – if only at a Butlin’s camp or a self-catering hotel in Blackpool – in 1939. Some leisure activities still correlated with gender: men owned most of the more than one million private motor cars on the road by 1930 and placed most of the millions of daily bets (gambling accounted for 5 per cent ...”

“... what advances his plots and broadens our sense of his characters. In an era where a species of self-congratulatory prose is often mistaken for writerly talent, Lennon’s unselfconscious style does not assault the reader with reminders of its hipness. It is perhaps for these reasons that Lennon is relatively unheard of in America, despite having written ...”

“... echoes the sound of Pindar’s keladêsomen in Olympian 2.2. We move swiftly to Ode 4.2, that self-subverting recusatio on which Pindar’s poetic reception has been based: Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari, Iulle, ceratis ope Daedalea nititur pennis, vitreo daturus nomina ponto. [4.2.1-4] Whoever strives to contend [aemulari] with ...”

“... urban life: for black and Asian writers, London is a place not of exile or alienation, but of ‘self-expansion’. Sandhu’s story gets going in the 18th century. There were blacks in London before then, but he wants to ‘show how they have depicted the city, rather than how they have been depicted’. So we start with Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography ...”

“... military aeronautics or utopian polar voyages was entangled, in Mendeleev’s own painstaking self-presentation, with the methodical administrator of the national system of standardised measures and the periodic system of atomic weights. Just as long as he saw the tsarist regime as an autocracy whose unconstrained will was directed towards lawlike ...”

“... the only people capable, for Wheeler, of keeping what they know ‘under their hats’. Moved by self-importance, people became twice as garrulous. The secret services, inspired to exploit all those loosened tongues in a different way from the eavesdropping Nazis, proposed to ‘find out what they would and wouldn’t be capable of doing and how far they ...”

“... and sometimes malevolent publications against the grievances of the innocent and the weak. Self-regulation, as its apologists call it, is not of course peculiar to newspapers. Doctors and lawyers discovered its attractions long ago, and anyone who buys a new house with crumbling brickwork or a leaking roof soon finds out that the National ...”

“... every country in Central and South America. De Bernières’s narratives are composed of short, self-sufficient segments which connect only obliquely with each other. His novels seem to be all subplot; their principal subject is as enigmatic as their riddlingly irrelevant titles. His prose has a distinctive flavour, but one easier to recognise than to ...”

“... prehistory. The novel begins in what now looks like Modiano’s trademark style, and very close to self-parody, and it takes a while to move into another mode. The narrator tells us about a newspaper entry he read ‘eight years ago’. The entry in turn dates from 1941, and describes a missing person, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, her parents’ address 41 ...”

“... archives – centuries apart – into something more coherent than their claim to ‘discrete and self-contained’ projects might suggest. Practising New Historicism declares itself to be a ‘belated recognition’ that something should or could have been said about this movement that did not think it was a movement. If it is twenty years too late to be a ...”

“... Fowler) and not for his work as a lexicographer. Fowler is the sacred text of the linguistically self-conscious. McMorris quotes a distinguished judge who ‘had been kept from his bed by it “to a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing”’. A.J.P. Taylor read the whole thing at least once a year, and ranked it as ...”

“... mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout to the homely tone of the 1960s Spider-Man ...”

“... of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials have recently appeared in magazines such as Wired, the Scientist, Commentary, the Weekly Standard and First Things ...”