“... in him and sundered from each other – whence his death – abolishing this little child ‘self’ sick in the springtime dead in the autumn – it’s the sun the wave idea the cough 2) son reabsorbed not gone it is him – or his brother I told him this two brothers – forced back remaining in the womb – sure of myself century will not pass by ...”

“... sprawl in his writing that has become more marked over the last decade (with the exception of the self-contained novella Blueback, 1997) is probably deliberate. Winton writes intense and hugely absorbing novels that make you really want to know what is going to happen next – but he is aiming, too, to make reading them a moral ...”

“... or good friends across what used to be a road – play in our Chief Boogey’s humanism and his self-defence? Ya’alon’s interviewer writes about the new Chief of Staff in language that now sounds like a parody of the sort of thing journalists wrote in 1967: When he speaks – he speaks; he says whatever is on his mind. And what’s on his mind is ...”

“... derailed near Carlisle and two passengers were killed. Very “Dick”, somehow.’) Later, as a self-satisfied bestselling author: ‘Peter has to write a third leader on Mosley and the BUF. I told him I’d met Mosley and been impressed with the man . . . a fair amount of what Mosley says, in the current climate, can’t be dismissed as fanaticism or ...”

“... one thinks of the current leader’s policies the case for unseating him is not absolutely self-evident. Those electoral calculations which have clearly influenced the behaviour of Labour MPs in the last month do have some force. Nevertheless, whatever calculations one makes about electoral advantage or disadvantage, the fact is that the Labour Party ...”

“... happy you’re real,’ a woman tells her when she is revealed to be Norma-off-the-radio. But her self-definition is built around a lack: ‘Rey’s absence clinging to her like some contagion’. Even more than Rey himself, she misses the person she was when she was with him. Unlike Alarcón’s stories, which are consistently gripping, Lost City Radio is ...”

“... all connections to American folk music’ – read jazz and rock and roll – ‘and instead self-consciously modelled itself on European serial models’. Janáček, as he saw it, offered a vital alternative path. Reich has repeatedly explored the musically expressive qualities of human speech in terms Janáček would have understood, if not ...”

“... including on Kashmir: an outline for a deal based on demilitarisation, open borders and a form of self-government or autonomy that would unite the divided territory. The Pakistani army attempted to defuse tensions along the Line of Control, closing militant training camps and co-ordinating security with the Indian army. The process collapsed partly because of ...”

“... borne outwards on a wave of overseas settlement, and then empire. At a deep level, their self-identity came to mean more than just ‘Englishness’ in a 20th-century or ‘ethnic’ sense. ‘Britishness’ in fact was an important feature of the resultant (and still prevalent) alibi-identity – not being like others, above that sort of thing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the wink in the final sentence. As ever, Bennett’s protagonist seems wholly at sea and cheekily self-assured at the same time. So, what is it she wants from language? She professes herself averse to metaphor, to the labour involved in describing one thing in terms of another. But what is the narrator’s – or Bennett’s – alternative? It’s not ...”

“... false narratives, and having two is more than twice as good as having only one.’ Are lies really self-cancelling, or is the candid answer that freedom to lie is part of the price we pay for freedom to speak? Anonymity compounds the conundrum. To expose or refute falsehood can be hard, but it can be far harder when you don’t know who the falsehood is coming ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thus were the British defeated. However, while the tiger is undoubtedly emblematic of Tipu, the self-styled Tiger of Mysore, and his fierce resistance to European colonialism, there is no evidence he had a particular European in mind. He may well have heard about the death of Munro – two of his sons were being held hostage by the British in Calcutta at ...”