“... the text of the burden of narrative, which to Flattery usually means tedious contrivance or self-serving sentimentality. The narrator of ‘Hump’ – a reference to the hunchback she suddenly develops – mocks the tendency to transform life and people into stories and characters as she does the catering at her father’s funeral, trying to avoid fake ...”

“... when the grievances of the Egyptian people have been met by the Egyptian government’. With their self-contained military cities, where comfortable apartments and foreign goods can be had at a discount, and with their vast stake in an economy based on a mix of clientelism and neo-liberalism, senior army officers live in a world apart from most ...”

“... being no one’s sleep under so many/lids’, the sheer peevishness, the withdrawal, the implicit self-adulation, the up-yours-even-unto-the-elbow-and-from-beyond-the-grave of these great souls, Heaney’s (I don’t know what it says on his grave) admirable humanity and unfathomable kindness become even more striking. His rare sense ‘of being here for good ...”

“... of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics ...”

“... that he seems increasingly to have felt at any use of the Eddic myths, as being alien to his self-consciously English models, and even dangerously pagan. In any case, the danger element in the myths, as Tolkien saw at an early date, was not exactly racism, of which there is little original trace, but the heroic world-view that some scholars chose to ...”

“... the emergence of behavioural economics, which acknowledges that humans are not only or not always self-interested utility-maximisers (Amartya Sen described homo economicus as a ‘rational fool’), but social, moral and emotional animals too; studies of economic ‘irrationality’ now proliferate. Experts and the market are no longer seen to be alternatives ...”

“... my species.’ In the context it seems invigorating. Michaels’s writing also seems more open to self-mockery. Sylvia sends the narrator out to the drugstore for Tampax, in order, he suspects, to humiliate him: ‘I dreaded the man at the counter, who would think I was an exceptionally bizarre Village transvestite. I asked for Tampax in a hoodlum-ish ...”

“... didn’t write after Mockingbird, this would seem to be the one that came closest to escaping her self-censoring vigilance. Much of the relevant biographical information is well known, but it takes on new meaning in the light of this project. It’s interesting to go back to the period in 1959 between delivery and publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, when ...”

“... needless to say, no respectable woman was allowed backstage, where only the entitled male – a self-declared ‘connoisseur’ of women, whether as lecher, or in rare cases, as painter – might tread. These baroque rules explain some painted facts: Degas had the freedom to place his focus anywhere in the theatre, the viewer’s nose and eye one moment ...”

“... and Just before the Divorce (a collection of poems) were published: both are woman-hating and self-parodying. In the title poem of Just before the Divorce, a man fantasises about raping and killing his wife, who has ‘middle-class desires’. He ‘hangs her perfect breasts from the attic rafter./A final shot –/dead, he grins at a twitching twat’. In ...”

“... as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and ...”

“... Whigs. The colour has faded from much of this polemic but what still shines out is the stunning self-possession and cultural arrogance of the Blackwood wits, who took 17 Princes Street for the centre of the literary universe. The review of Biographia Literaria dismissed Coleridge as an ‘obscure name in English literature’ on the grounds that, though he ...”

“... the 1848 Revolution as a ‘parody’ of 1793 in which the guillotine ‘plagiarised’ its former self; the Revolution of 1793, acted out by men, was mimicked in 1848 by monkeys. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire draws on similar metaphors of repetition and parody, though Marx had little time for Hugo’s Châtiments because ‘Hugo contents himself with bitterly ...”

“... life in general, one which smacks of the patrician rather than the puritan. Adopting this witty, self-ironising style has been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the ...”

“... other factor helps to explain why Italy is a country of the centre-right. It is the home of the self-employed, more so than any other country in Europe. Small shops have survived and even prospered in a way that would be quite unimaginable in Northern Europe or North America. Family firms have played the crucial role in the construction of industrial ...”