“... Thetis, the mythical self-transforming nereid, could be the shape-shifting guiding presence behind these three books. Carol Ann Duffy and Jo Shapcott write poems about her, or more exactly through her, while transformation and metamorphosis, travel through time, space and states of being lie at the core of Gwyneth Lewis’s second English-language collection, Zero Gravity (her mother tongue is Welsh ...”

“... on an anguished debate about the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity in a corrupt, self-seeking society that demands lies and collusion. Written in exile, these books were strongly anti-Fascist in tone, and, when translated, contributed to making Mussolini’s regime less popular abroad in the mid-1930s than it had been ten years ...”

“... degree on victimhood at the hands of other countries, China is none too keen to fess up to its self-mutilations. There are no museums or memorials dedicated to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine – together the cause of more than thirty million deaths – and academic or artistic work must follow the Party line precisely. Chinese historians do ...”

“... slaughter; that he ordered the genocidal bombing of Cambodia and Vietnam with B-52s for paltry and self-interested reasons; that he certainly connived in and probably gave the green light to the assassination attempt on Archbishop Makarios, to the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, all manner of atrocities in Chile, including the assassinations of Orlando ...”

“... heart of darkness. At the time it was clear that there was no chance of getting in touch with your self unless you had witnessed what nature had so perversely, so patriarchally, hidden from your view. Though it seems odd, on those grounds, that we didn’t also require a personal view of our anuses, the goal was a sighting of the cervix, a seeing into the very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fashions to copy; and the crane operator, the intermediary between the world and the port, is a self-taught naturalist. In his cabin there is a library, as well as a football – ‘like the orb of a strange planet’ – that bounced from the deck of a moored British ship in 1904. Korea’s scabby head reminds everyone of a globe, inspiring ...”

“... into a single Muslim country when he wrote the book, relying instead on Orientalist cliché. A self-serving fantasy of the exotic East as foil to Western superiority took deep root. It even permeates letters I have read in provincial archives in the north of England in which happy British women congratulate themselves on having escaped the fate of their ...”

“... solid basis for these institutions, at least one that is not founded in violence, the violence of self-authorised power. It is this paradox that intrigues these theorists: that the beginnings of sovereignty and law seem to lie in an exception to the just rule that they otherwise purport to represent and to secure. They puzzle over this conundrum for what it ...”

“... way as Milton’s Comus, say, or Handel and Gay’s Acis and Galatea. The etchings are elegant, self-conscious, mostly light-hearted things, even when their subject matter is riotous or worse. In plate 56, for example, done on 30 March 1933, the elderly sculptor and his model, both naked and plumped up on pillows, gaze a bit vacantly at a marble the ...”

“... requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy; the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research ...”

“... was a deer . . . I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi,’ it almost seems like Moore is offering a self-parody. ‘I don’t know – words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage reminds me of sausage.’ When Tassie listens to Christmas music, ‘“Rejoice, rejoice” sounded like “Read Joyce, read Joyce,” and so I did, getting a head start on ...”

“... The behaviour of the Conservatives we could expect; their opposition was as much instinctive as self-interested. They are the party of the constitution, after all. But the sight of those clapped-out Labour warhorses (who had had no trouble voting for reformed systems in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) enthusiastically supporting a Tory-funded campaign ...”

“... in such a system: this is the ‘diachronic dimension’. Saussure’s great Mémoire, which he self-published in 1878 and which inferred the system of word structure in the reconstructed proto-Indo-European language, had in large part already demonstrated the ‘structural’ approach to linguistic form and its historical transformation that he never ...”

“... lets in mistakes every so often, only to call attention to the façade. Bieber is by now the most self-conscious celebrity in the world, partly because of the extensive record of his life, refreshed every few minutes on Twitter, YouTube, blogs, mainstream media and the rest of the internet to which he’s owed his fame from the start. Wayne takes a slapstick ...”