“... Vietnam, the legacy of colonialism, the immigrant experience; his ironic tone that gives a highly self-conscious (and comic) sheen to stories of suffering, death and displacement; a recursive mode of storytelling that constantly returns to the events of the narrator’s childhood, his work as a double agent and the crimes ‘of which I had never been ...”

“... a brand new day? The Biden administration has announced that Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and self-emancipated freewoman, will appear on the $20 bill. The portrait of a person once regarded as capital is to be printed on a banknote. Dark-skinned people, like those who cleaned up the Capitol building after 6 January, have always had to do a lot of work ...”

“... the city, and Thailand in general, ‘as a place of exile that sometimes fosters a taste for self-invention’. It’s now his home but when he first turned up there in the 1990s it was to drink and have adventures (which included being picked up by a middle-aged Japanese woman, going back to her hotel room for sex and stealing money from her ...”

“... I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations!’ He listens to his younger self describe a moment of spiritual realisation – ‘that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten’ – without a flicker of recognition. Krapp then files a new recording in a rasping voice. ‘Just been ...”

“... ways. In the pages of the census, according to the Times, lay the ‘foundation of a more complete self-knowledge’. This belief – that Britons learned who they were by subjecting themselves to the statistical gaze – was widely accepted in the Victorian age. And the feeling that numbers cannot – and therefore must not – lie accounted for some of my ...”

“... and the collapse of state industry – struck back and returned Poland to government by self-pitying ‘super-patriots’. But the idea of the Gdańsk museum had been conceived in the hopeful years. And it was a noble idea. Almost all war museums are ‘national’. They show relics of ‘our’ war, with enough reference to the experience of other ...”

“... and Catherine Coulson, aka the Log Lady. That wasn’t the only way in which Lynch seemed more self-referential and ruminative than before, or to be addressing the world beyond the fantasy. History had, in some ways, caught up with Twin Peaks: Jerry Horne was now in the legal weed business, Dr Jacoby was broadcasting anti-corporate rants online, Sheriff ...”

“... marathons in bewilderingly rapid sequence, all for charity, so that the element of masculine self-assertion was transcended almost before it had begun. Perry doesn’t say much about his art in The Descent of Man, though he describes it as a place where he can safely put his anger. Part of the paradoxical appeal of pottery for him was that, like ...”

“... well as highly developed economies. A strong case for this can be made on the basis of enlightened self-interest, but after so much suffering and death some genuine altruism wouldn’t go amiss.19 ...”

“... Tony Blair​ ’s long-winded memoir A Journey (2010) is strikingly light on self-recrimination. He regrets ‘with every fibre of my being’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise ...”

“... be a winter where nothing and nobody works. The government paints strikes as cynical ploys for self-enrichment, but they are motivated by workload – intensified as a result of budget cuts – as much as by wages. So far, public sympathy seems on their side: the slogan ‘enough is enough’ resonates well beyond union members.Truss didn’t create these ...”

“... it will be hemmed in again, the frigidarium will be re-covered, and Cluny will return to its true self. Perhaps. Stranger things have happened here. But Desmoulin’s brief is for this century: ‘to offer to the public those services and amenities nowadays considered the mark of a great national museum’. In other words, a visitor centre with the holy ...”

“... contrary even with contrarians and comfortable in her contradictions. She even revelled in them self-parodically: accepting honours (the DBE) from the monarchy she rejected, rooting for England in the cricket against her native Australia, though she loathed the British Empire and excoriated its methods and its legacy in her last book, Oh Happy Day: Those ...”

“... adjuncts to sacred art. If the assertive new somebodies of the 15th century wanted a licence for self-promotion, they could turn to Jesus balancing the things that are Caesar’s against the things that are God’s, legitimising both. Why not supplement the carved and painted saints in church with secular portraits that referred back to imperial imagines? A ...”

“... were putting on plays about asylum. But German perspectives on the crisis were sober and often self-congratulatory. They rarely spoke to the negotiations and absurdities of leaving one’s country. This carnival of well-meaning had a fetishistic quality that wasn’t lost on Syrians. In a series of interviews with Arab writers in Germany, published in ...”