“... she gets dressed, all alone.’) Demonpion records the grievances of Schnäbele (in the novel, a self-aggrandising IT manager known as ‘the Serpent’), who has no memory of meeting Houellebecq: ‘I recognise myself in his descriptions. He describes my office, mentioning the posters that I had up at that time, which proves that he was physically there ...”

“... pure Morris: an eye and ear attentive to the way we look and talk, without ever lapsing into the self-indulgent journalism or sociology that makes up our best-seller lists; a heart and mind determined to face the deepest questions, without ever lapsing into existentialist clichés or easy religious formulae. It is a mixture that has naturally led critics to ...”

“... maybe that place where you learn those things is the real secret life, where you collect your real self, piece by piece. ‘Maybe she had good reason,’ Jason said. ‘I thought that she was troubled, that something was wrong.’‘She could lay for hours,’ Blake recalls in Molly, ‘typing surrounded by books and snacks and pillows with the lights off. I ...”

“... than to lift people out of poverty in the global South. I have lost count of the number of times a self-identified climate progressive has explained to me that our individual consumption and emissions are irrelevant; that what we need to do is strand fossil fuel assets. Yes, asset stranding is needed. But it’s a nonsense to think that production shapes ...”

“... collection of stories. It’s told from the perspective of Julian, another of her ineffectual, self-righteous liberals, whose mother is supporting him ‘until he got on his feet’. She likes him to accompany her to her weight-loss class every week, as she feels uncomfortable riding the buses at night now they’re no longer segregated. Julian’s only ...”

“... literary biography. To write the biography of a biography already suggests a certain disciplinary self-consciousness. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer.One of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Candour & Comfort & Coffee & Cribbage’), Johnsonian lapidary pronouncement (‘I am looking over Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its’ being an excellently meant, elegantly written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it’), the effusions of Mrs Radclyffe (‘the shades of Evening are descending & I resume my interesting ...”

“... who speculate), the fight against inflation, or better still, the achievement of deflation, is self-evidently the only blessed cause. But central bankism would be politically weak if it did not also attract the support of the passive Left everywhere – the Left that is much concerned with the welfare of ordinary working stiffs but unwilling to risk any ...”

“... like the one that burns in mine. My ear hears in this passage uncertainty, fear, pain, love, self-deprecation, style (‘I cannot be admired. I am not a thing to be admired’) and humour (‘snub-nos’d brunettes with meeting eyebrows’) – but I do not hear anything that could conceivably be described as a squeal. It is unsettling, in a biography of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... live in seclusion, until he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. This infuriated the self-righteous Moynier, who in the latter part of his 46-year stint as president, tried hard to expunge any mention of Dunant from the organisation’s records. Such contradictions are the stuff of the Red Cross, whose ‘International Committee’ was, until ...”