“... to subvert the unexamined shibboleths of the British state. For the Union of 1707 is far from self-explanatory. The Union of the Parliaments in 1707 followed a century after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the Scottish royal line had succeeded to the English throne. This loose personal union preserved separate Scottish and English kingdoms, which ...”

“... and inescapable – youdunnit. Invoking polycausality in writing about murder may be a cultural self-defence mechanism, which we may have inherited via a number of crooked byways from ancient Greece: by imbuing murder with large numbers of overlapping motives, and by embedding it in fictions which include the occult and the inexplicable (madness, jealous ...”

“... who might be trying to say something that Barnett fails to understand. These episodes are told self-deprecatingly – a narrative of successive misperceptions, the consequences of which are understood only after it is too late. Foreigners, Barnett is telling us in the course of this extended self-criticism, can rarely ...”

“... without ever coming into focus. In a daze of refracted marine light, they find themselves, these self-hypnotised actors, in the same De Chirico painting: interior as exterior. Sleepwalkers sunburned on one side. Magically, they avoid collisions. They float towards no particular destination, with no motive beyond movement itself; a beating of the bounds. The ...”

“... The word is not accidentally chosen. Direct and home sales in this period employed the rhetoric of self-help, positive thinking and popular religion. (Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional wine salesman Montague Egg, with his upbeat rhyming maxims out of the Salesman’s Handbook, is a good example of the tribe.) Thousands of dealers made the ‘Stanley ...”

“... with which he is covertly complicit, he writes scornfully of ‘the indignant diatribes of self-righteous post-colonial censors’, perhaps a necessary disowning of the voguish for a book which includes a chapter devoted to the protuberant buttocks and plump, pendulous or sagging breasts to be found in representations of female savages. Despite these ...”

“... to the billboards put up by the authorities in an attempt to create an atmosphere of national self-improvement. ‘Be your brother’s keeper,’ one urges. ‘Total reconciliation before 2024.’ Others instruct a dispossessed public – the Red Cross estimates 80 per cent of the population has been displaced by the fighting – to go back and farm the ...”

“... rights that sustained the original uprising is dismissed as a distraction, the preoccupation of self-righteous amateurs, while seasoned servants of the old regime are rehabilitated. Most disheartening of all, the sycophants who rushed for cover three years ago are re-emerging to offer their services to the new masters. Egypt’s briefly empowered citizens ...”

“... Party (your in-group), then anything an environmentalist (your out-group) tells you is going to be self-evidently wrong, regardless of its factual content – and vice versa. Research carried out in Norway, and Marshall’s own work in Texas, demonstrates that even when people have lived through unprecedented wildfires and snowmelt they maintain an ...”

“... the Islamic State astonished its enemies by sweeping through Iraq’s second city, Mosul, the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a mosque to give a victory speech. When he raised his right arm to emphasise a point, the sleeve of his black robe fell back to reveal what some on social media identified as a Rolex watch. Online ...”

“... his own books of perfect poems for more than fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’ And ...”

“... have poetry without dandyism, and that includes all those I’ve mentioned: Frederick Seidel self-evidently, but also those seemingly austere figures Whitman, Brecht, Murray and Brodsky. As Wallace Stevens said, ‘It must give pleasure.’) It looks random, but like Thom Gunn’s blue jay scuffling in the bushes, it ‘follows some hidden ...”

“... adept in modern forms of communication, and decked out in green. The Islamic Republic’s self-image, virtuous and united against relentless foreign conspiracies, was shattered under the force of mass demonstrations, street violence, the ill-treatment and murder of young men and women, squabbling factions, incivility, seminarians at loggerheads, and ...”

“... objective, abstract and rational, showing instead that the school began with a gothic, mystical self-image. The first logo, the winning entry in a student competition, was a mishmash of Eastern and occult symbols. Early pieces made in the workshops – bulbous earthenware pitchers by Otto Lindig, wooden reliefs by Joost Schmidt and stained glass by Josef ...”

“... nearly molested, aged five, on a beach, by a wavy-haired stranger. Her well-developed sense of self enables the narrative, for the most part, to zip along. She has delivered parts of the book as a very enjoyable, sometimes dazzling one-woman show (I saw her last year at the Bath Literary Festival), and at times – particularly in the delightful early ...”