“... is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist sympathies whose fiction is self-described as ‘weird’. Miéville is not a historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is not at all weird, but elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving. What he sets out to do, and admirably succeeds in doing, is to write an exciting ...”

“... to dismiss Mayakovsky’s early political commitment as naive idealism, and later in his life as a self-destructive effort to conform. His political poems – about a third of his output – are rarely translated and considered hackery. Rosy Carrick’s new selection of his work, Volodya, doesn’t go along with this reading. In her introduction Carrick argues ...”

“... the society around them.Personal Crisis – Family tensions; sense of isolation; adolescence; low self-esteem; disassociating from existing friendship group and becoming involved with a new and different group of friends; searching for answers to questions about identity, faith and belonging.Personal Circumstances – Migration; local community ...”

“... be heartfelt. But if Lake is right it follows that the earl’s indignation is either simulated or self-deceiving. That does not mean the scene must be played that way, for it is a defining feature of Shakespeare’s art that his characterisations will sustain any number of interpretations in performance. But Lake’s point may indicate how it would have been ...”

“... and Trump employees were quickly uncovered by Cosmopolitan and other periodicals devoted to self-image. It is estimated that two-thirds of Americans are overweight.Diplomats Seventy-five former career ambassadors and retired State Department officials, who traditionally have no party affiliations, have signed a letter calling Trump ‘ignorant’ and ...”

“... that kind of money to live in a two-bedroom flat in Vauxhall. The target market is glaringly, self-evidently non-local.This is happening in a city where, by universal consent, one of the biggest problems is the lack of affordable housing. For many Londoners, younger people especially, the cost of housing is their first concern; living in what the Joseph ...”

“... 1910, he set out to edit a selection of William’s letters only to end up producing a remarkable self-portrait. Though he had intended to preface the letters with a short history of their family, recollection soon faltered. Little more than a year separated the two oldest James children, but as far as Henry could remember, William had been ‘always round ...”

“... Taylor puts it in his new biography, Proust’s ‘vitality’ was ‘checkmated by the excess of self-seeing’; knowing these people – knowing anyone – ended in catastrophic disappointment. Only a new lyricism of self-doubt could do justice to his bafflement at himself and what he wanted; his long sentences defer the ...”

“... attempt to seize power in the ‘beer-hall putsch’ of November 1923 was an important part of its self-image in subsequent years. Hitler went to prison for leading the putsch, and the period following his release in 1924 was pivotal. Believing that Röhm’s continued advocacy of the violent seizure of power was counterproductive, and alienated by his close ...”

“... doused with contempt, as the US media declare that his line is dictated by murky commercial self-interest, political payback for help during his election campaign or even blackmail. Whatever Trump’s motives – and he clearly didn’t think carefully before adopting most of his policies – the argument for trying to have better relationships with ...”

“... on 27 January 1756. Leopold, Wolfgang’s father, was a composer and violinist who had recently self-published a violin primer which quickly became a standard text. His promotion to the position of deputy Kapellmeister in the court of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg – he led the orchestra when the Kapellmeister was ...”

“... when he was 14, and largely pursued his own interests from then on. Precocity was key to his self-image. When he was 12, he created the Info Network, an online encyclopedia launched two years before Wikipedia, and soon after he was part of the RSS working group; for months, no one knew they were dealing with a teenager. His lack of deference helped to ...”

“... federal project’: a United States of Europe. The book is part Federalist Papers, part self-serving memoir. It will confirm in their prejudices all of those who have a certain idea of ‘the Brussels-based elite’. Verhofstadt trumpets his ‘decades in service to the European peoples’. He also reveals some of his private passions in order to ...”

“... libertinage and Catholic mysticism. Binet casts Sollers as a childishly boastful, histrionically self-involved buffoon who tirelessly spews either free-associative prose-poetry or monologues about, say, Americans’ amazing obliviousness to Derrida’s debt to his novel Numbers (1966), ‘which no one in New York or California has ever bothered to ...”

“... it ‘ruinously flawed’. The usual explanation for the split between O’Nolan’s all-out self-confidence and his air of anxious insecurity – a mixture of ‘fretfulness and swagger’, as Maebh Long puts it – is that it was a consequence of his failure to find a publisher for The Third Policeman. By 1941, when he turned thirty, O’Nolan had ...”