“... 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 ...”

“... his gay protagonists, but we get little sense of their emotional lives. They aren’t inclined to self-scrutiny. ‘We fell out of touch,’ Cam says, when asked about his estrangement from TJ. ‘The end.’ Jokes and gestures stand in for confessional outpourings, occasionally revealing an unacknowledged depth of feeling. But elsewhere the laconic dialogue ...”

“... reveals so well what, however artfully concealed, lay beneath the surface of his work: guilt, self-loathing, pettiness.Though Hecht’s poems often resembled cake decorations, he concealed an inner darkness that would occasionally refuse the frippery and leave the reader astonished. One of his most gorgeous poems, ‘Persistences’, begins:The leafless ...”

“... enthusiasm. The referendum inspired a return to active citizenship, encouraged by the kind of self-fashioning optimism about ‘new’ politics that it is fatal to refute. Of course, independence wouldn’t have been all it was cracked up to be. That wasn’t the point. Labour offered nothing remotely like the ideal of politics that people saw in the ...”

“... that Dan Carden, once a Corbynite Green New Dealer, now convenes the Blue Labour Group and writes self-flagellating articles calling for a wave of reindustrialisation through rearmament. The remainder of the party’s left that has not been expelled or gagged implores its leaders to take on vested interests and raise taxes on the rich. All agree on the need ...”

“... sets out six specimens equidistant in a row. Each is a fragment, but each has the quality of self-possession characteristic of McEwen. From left to right they are a broken bud, a small leaf lightly withered, a larger leaf also withered, a piece of bark, three seed pods, a torn branch and a sycamore seed with one wing missing. Writing about another series ...”

“... was a dreamwork, both in the sense that it performs work on dreams and in the sense it gives of a self-amusing dream of what intellectual work could be.’ But then what about the writing and the thinking? Connor has some good commentary on those activities too.Bachelard was born in 1884 in Bar-sur-Aube, a town in eastern France. He taught science in a school ...”

“... Gladiator. The third, silhouetted with his back to us and obscuring the candle flame, is a self-portrait: the artist shown blocking his own light source.Wright’s predecessor for candlelights in Britain was the 17th-century Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken, who had worked in London in the 1690s. Thanks to Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in ...”

“... literature as practised by Flaubert are both equally relaxed. Sand can’t understand the terrible self-denial of his literary creed. ‘You’re keeping an exuberant nature shut up in jail!’ she writes to him. Flaubert for his part restates it as an absolute: ‘I feel an unconquerable aversion to putting anything of my heart on paper. I even think that a ...”

“... and voyeur. ‘She saw in his face a look with which she was familiar; a stern withdrawn self-absorption as if he were stoically enduring a private pain.’ There are obsessive descriptions of seat-belts, driving gloves, ‘sensitive hands lying lightly on the wheel’. It’s rare for the now deified AD (‘probably the most intelligent detective in ...”

“... a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self. I became a revisionist, luckily, just as the word was coming into vogue; it was a term of abuse used about historians who were peddling anti-nationalist views of Irish history. The most seriously revisionist text, however, to appear in those years was John ...”

“... Perhaps measuring the miles travelled from BP to AH and squeezing the available evidence into the self-evident and unhelpful notion of ‘persistent localism’ (of course they were ‘local’ people, hoping to preserve the village worlds they knew: what else could they have been?) – perhaps that may not be the best way to assess the lives that people ...”

“... in public life, has been transformed in the last twenty years. This vocabulary might be self-parodying or absurd – and often is – but it now has no competitor. It has thus been difficult for us even to imagine that the political vehicle of this victorious ideology – precisely because of its victory – could itself be defeated. It is here that ...”

“... that makes his work literary – that is, usefully open to interpretation – in ways that more self-consciously literary works of critical theory are not. His defence of the canon points toward a stronger and more unsettling conclusion than anything he explicitly offers. He argues early in the book that all works that enter the literary canon are ...”

“... a politics of one or another kind of ‘national socialism’. In order to avoid a return to such self-defeating strategies, the International Monetary and Financial Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods in 1944 agreed to restore stability with a new kind of gold standard, to recover prosperity by means of freed international ...”