“... and gives it its strange mind, so to speak. Even when he seems to slip back into his old acting self, the effect is different. As Frank Costello, head of the Irish syndicate in Boston, is speaking of a rat who has infiltrated his organisation, he suddenly makes a cartoonish rat face, all teeth and sniffing nose. A little later, in a grotesque spoof of the ...”

“... as a kind of nod or wink or coded sexual hint. ‘Almost everything in his letter to Symonds is a self-revelation: the love of Italy; the small number of people, the exchanged look, the "victims of a common passion", and that key word "unspeakably", attached to "tender".’ Robb has not spotted an engaging characteristic of James’s, which one often comes ...”

“... seedy World’s Fair Hotel in the suburb of Englewood, close by the entrance to Jackson Park. A self-trained pharmacist, Holmes tickled credit out of tradesmen as readily as he charmed lonely women into serial bigamy. He had already built his Englewood building when the World’s Fair was announced. He promptly converted it into a hotel and installed a ...”

“... the reader. (After he has ribbed authors who rely on ‘arrogance, bullying, puffery, rapacity, self-awe and the tipping of winks’ in order to get on, he makes a confession: ‘In the end I believe it’s better simply to be honest and to try to be explicit. And if you can’t be, you should at least try and pretend.’) The backward-looking shopkeepers ...”

“... From the standard perspective which holds that economic agency is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this stance is obvious: populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and increased deregulation means more freedom for the corporations that are driving impoverished farmers out of ...”

“... talented, witty, artistic, they said – and then one day she was middle-aged, frumpy, snobbish, self-centred, a raddled old gin tippler and a bore. So much apparent promise, so little follow through.However, all was not as it seemed to readers of Nanny Crawfie’s tales about Princess Margaret Rose in the 1940s, and to excited observers of the ...”

“... of an English aristocrat – tall, handsome, cultivated’ and a natural Tory. The latter was a self-made man in a world almost entirely without them, ‘brilliant but with a reputation of being ruthlessly ambitious, unreliable and too clever by half’. Both had links to Ireland, and both had disrupted upbringings. Castlereagh was educated at Cambridge and ...”

“... that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the self-described ‘all-devouring pop-culture wiki’ which has done so much to contribute to our understanding of modern literary and artistic tropes, trends, devices, possibilities and all forms of story structure. TV Tropes helps to explicate, illustrate and ...”

“... guerrillas, the army, and the paramilitary death squads, which emerged in the 1980s as civilian self-defence contingents and worked with the army, often in conjunction with drug mafias. At least six million people have been displaced. The government has tried, and failed, to negotiate peace with the Farc on three occasions since it took up arms in 1964 to ...”

“... illustrious, predatory queer; inventor and supporter of colleagues and hangers-on; impresario and self-appointed hero of a tradition that he put together from all kinds of sources – Buddhist, Hebraic, European, pre-Columbian – in order to loosen the American grain and leave a lasting trace. In fact American poetry was already a rich, eclectic mix when he ...”

“... is economically active but not politically engaged. It promotes private autonomy over collective self-government, and economic freedom over political freedom. Under cosmopolitanism conditions, a constitution is no longer conceived as a document enshrining the fundamental laws of a people. Instead, its meaning must be continuously re-interpreted in the light ...”

“... in The People’s Clearance (1982) that Highlanders ‘largely lacked … the ability of fluent self-expression’. Hunter is careful to present the evidence for all he records. No assertion is left unqualified. The evictors are quoted verbatim – and of course they were in command of the contemporary media and had a great deal to say. They were ...”

“... state of eruption’, and in Europa ’51 as the bereaved mother who finds God. From Clare’s self-imposed hunger she can conjure Simone Weil, who left the anti-fascist Spanish Brigades when she witnessed the murder of a child. ‘When a child is killed for someone else’s idea,’ Howe concludes, ‘the idea is finished.’Which brings us back to the ...”

“... a close friend, at a party. Nothing much happens, and he justifies everything in the devious, self-deluding style we have come to expect from first-person narrators: ‘We didn’t take off our shoes, which made a difference, morally.’ But Marie’s husband, Lee, doesn’t accept the same fine distinctions, and punches him in the face. This incident ...”

“... they had less chance to sell their work. Wilkie Collins described the taste and enthusiasms of the self-made industrialists of the mid-19th century: they wanted paintings, he said, with ‘interesting subjects, variety, resemblance to nature, genuineness of the article, and fresh paint’. So there was money in new art – the Pre-Raphaelites were favoured in ...”