“... comedy, and far too crude to work as anything else. Smith works in a certain amount of protective self-consciousness: Gen and Eric are obviously meant to be a ‘generic’ couple. But does that help the reader, really – knowing that the author knows her targets are obvious? In The Accidental, Smith writes very well from the adolescent perspective, only ...”

“... was Karl Rove’s reaction on meeting Bush for the first time in 1973. Wowed as he was by this self-made Texan, Rove, of all the president’s advisers, has been treated with more than occasional contempt. When Rove’s mobile phone rang during a meeting on Capitol Hill, Bush evicted him and locked the door so he couldn’t get back in. Bush would get Rove ...”

“... Spain; but the couplet repeated at the end of each stanza locates the ultimate strangeness in the self. Each time they sing the couplet, the voices stop after the first four words. Then, slowly, alto, bass and one tenor (joined after two beats by the other singers) begin a drawn-out ‘yet’, whose new harmonies draw attention to the new theme: human ...”

“... one and one who says ‘fuck’ a lot, while Andrew shares his body with, among others, an inner self-helper, a frightened little boy, a kindly maiden aunt and a grimly competent ‘protector’. Seferis, the protector, is a nine-foot-tall student of martial arts; he speaks only in Greek and, like the Incredible Hulk, can perform improbable feats when he’s ...”

“... into the picture – Kingdon more literally than most, since many of his illustrations are wry self-portraits. For him, the creatures that travelled up the rivers from the coast were precursors of man the ...”

“... confidence in the institution or a radical rethink of its operation. It would be impertinent and self-contradictory to suggest that the rulings of the Court of Appeal and the Law Lords were or could be wrong in law. Those rulings are the law. But we should consider their implications for the human rights of those facing deportation or, failing ...”

“... the magnificent Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the benefactor of the musician Palestrina’. He is a self-absorbed, ambitious young man with very few interests or accomplishments that would mark him out as a scion of the cultural Renaissance. Benvenuto Cellini, who claimed Ippolito had an ‘evil nature’, portrayed him as manipulative and untrustworthy, and ...”

“... she can’t escape being defined by her dress. Her untidiness had been understood as a lack of self-respect, not as stylishness. A local rebel, Dawn (‘back-combed hair and chalk-white eyelids’), provides a useful lesson: ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing someone else’s rags. My Mum wouldn’t let me out the house in that!’ She strutted away with her ...”

“... when it was crueller than he knew; but this isn’t sufficient cause for Jem’s adult misery and self-mutilation (which isn’t to say that just because her depression doesn’t originate in trauma it is any less real or unpleasant). Jem’s problem is conveyed by the novel’s form as much as anything: she is locked in the past; her sense of time is ...”

“... Insofar as she has been recovered at all it has been by feminist scholars excited by the self-conscious modernity of her Galesia trilogy, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713), A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1726). (They became available in a fully annotated OUP ...”

“... he can barely hide his own surprise, and what makes him interesting is the shadow of his other self, the serfdom he never quite escaped. The young Aleksandr didn’t exactly start from scratch. His grandfather, a cobbler, drowned in his fifties after an undistinguished life of hard work, taverns and conjugal rows. But his father, Vasily ...”

“... the dozen. It’s a book in a lower key that doesn’t end, like the others, with a tricksy bit of self-reflexivity about narrative. It takes its tone from the title story, which is atypical of Simpson, and nothing like a fable, but quite like life. Characters appear in more than one story, so destroying the jigsaw effect. I wonder whether her fans will be ...”

“... The novel runs down to a predictable conclusion. Mitchell fudges Eiji’s final moment of self-awareness, almost as if he has lost interest in the ending himself: ‘I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found. I wait, and cross back over Omekaido Avenue. I feel release. I complete one, two, three circuits. I can go ...”

“... temporally remote. It’s unmistakeably the Deep South, but the world of the novel is hermetically self-contained. The heroine is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 12 years old, ‘sturdily built, like a small badger, with round cheeks, a sharp nose, black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth’. When she was a baby, her big brother Robin was ...”

“... back to life. Being in heaven is like participating in a not especially intellectually rigorous self-help encounter group. It’s also oddly consumerist: when Susie tells Franny that she doesn’t really know what she wants out of heaven, Franny tells her, ‘“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know ...”