“... Party. When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique. The Chinese learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward ...”

“... that their real relevance lies ‘in the connection between the activity of autobiographical self-analysis and the formation of class consciousness’. Much subsequent work has followed his advice. However, Griffin argues – and I think she’s right – that the memoirs span ‘a broad swathe of working-class life’ and that the writers’ families ...”

“... drift. Conversations are drained of meaning, running aground on her vagueness and her husband’s self-interested exasperation. She suspects Paul of an affair, and occasionally hints at mild displeasure, without summoning the energy for a confrontation. She writes to Jerry, an English guest who left a copy of George Meredith’s The Egoist in the ...”

“... to each other, as Randeep clings to Avtar, is just as likely to drag them down as save them. And self-sacrifice too often ends up doing more harm than good, to the people they are trying to help as well as to the martyrs themselves. Yet none of that means that there isn’t a right thing to do, or that they don’t feel guilty when they don’t do it. As the ...”

“... of Winston Churchill, evidence for repressed homosexuality includes narcissism, exhibitionism, self-consciousness about ‘his short and hairless body’ and a passion for silk underwear. Oh, and he got on with Noël Coward. In his foreword, Matthew Parris insists that ‘Bloch is very, very careful to distinguish between rumour, report and ...”

“... Soviets – he wrote: I see another guarantee for Russia’s future: the fact that it is led by a self-confident, firm government driven by great political ideals … Their worldview is unacceptable to me. And yet slowly and unsurely the hope awakens in me that they will lead the Russian people, perhaps against its will, down the right path to a sure goal and ...”

“... regime element’. The caliph has been far more effective in government than that other self-declared leader of the faithful, the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. In part this can be explained by the difference in levels of education in Iraq and Afghanistan, but again many of those who witnessed Islamic State’s victories in Syria detected the techniques ...”

“... a troubling pleasure to be got from well-made sentences about unspeakable acts. The North Water is self-consciously literary, thick with allusions to other books: Moby-Dick, obviously (Sumner is less Ishmael than Ahab by the time he limps off across the ice in pursuit of a white bear); Conrad (there’s something of Lord Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his ...”

“... and queer theory to debates about sex work and anti-rape activism, major shifts in French sexual self-definition often transected with the figure of the ‘Arab’, and especially the ‘Arab man’. Arabs themselves – in France they were mostly North Africans – had a part in this conversation, though scarcely on equal terms. Shepard argues persuasively ...”

“... neither short nor tall, her hair neither dark nor fair’, and has for many years been living in self-imposed exile in Prague – her reasons are withheld until three-quarters of the way through the book. This means that Perry can grant us only partial access to her thoughts, with often frustrating results. Walking down the street, she hears someone singing ...”

“... yes, the firmness and the courage and the faith of someone who has achieved something through self-reliance. What’s the use of shuffling along timidly in one’s own country? Warĩĩnga, the black beauty! Warĩĩnga of the mind and hands and body and heart, walking in rhythmic harmony on life’s journey! Warĩĩnga, the worker!Now a mechanical ...”

“... want to hear.’ She makes a good living from teasing men. Male comedians have retreated to self-mockery; none of them would commit career suicide by teasing his female audience. But sometimes men like Li Dan get carried away. Li was recently invited by an underwear brand to promote a new bra (an odd choice) and decided to make a pun on tangying, which ...”

“... tried (and failed) to redress it. All five died violent deaths, from stabbing and decapitation to self-evisceration. By the middle of the first century, Rome was destined for rule by one man. Plutarch seems not to notice that in the course of this turmoil a cultural revolution took place, as Romans stepped away from the cultural shadow of Greece, producing a ...”

“... in Ireland). This exciting work, which for all its evidential value is also a manifest piece of self-fashioning, finally made it into print in 1928. Lougee, in the course of a long-standing professional interest in female autobiography, noted a suggestion in a specialist article that the manuscript behind the printed version survived, and resolved to track ...”

“... writes, propose a kind of alternative canon, in an attempt to ‘uproot Spanish fiction from its self-referential co-ordinates and inscribe it within a wider cartography aware of the current globalised world’. Since the Nocilla project, Mallo has published two more novels, another book of poetry and two books of theory. We can expect a steady feed of ...”