“... The writers themselves prefer ‘noir’ and there is nothing unreasonable in that. The most self-conscious stylist among them is Lucarelli. In Almost Blue a serial killer is on the loose in Bologna but the police psychologists are bewildered: the killer appears to change identity with each murder. Only the voice remains the same. The hero, Simone, is a ...”

“... effectively already written the book that Pierce is wanting to write, and with a slightly weary self-referentiality the prefatory matter of his unfinished book is almost exactly the same as the ‘author’s note’ to The Solitudes, which begins: ‘More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books.’ Kraft’s works – and those of ...”

“... in 1846, helped to establish her credentials as a shrewd social critic. Anna Leonowens, another self-reliant woman, also saw that she could make literature out of her experiences. In 1870 she wrote a titillating and entirely untrustworthy account of working as a governess to the family of King Mongkut of Siam, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (it ...”

“... that Chen remembers are by the 11th-century poet Su Dongpu: ‘Long, long I lament/there is not a self for me to claim.’ There is another, more benign cultural force at work in these novels, one that ties Chen and his colleagues to China’s past: food. What booze and bars are to the American gumshoe, food is to his Chinese counterpart. Luscious ...”

“... allowed to continue to work at GTMO, but without any retirement rights. In 1979, Jimmy Carter – self-proclaimed champion of human rights – softened this policy, decreeing that Cubans who commuted to the base would receive a government pension. But this decision – which simply gave workers what was owed to them – applied only to those who retired after ...”

“... constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.’But to be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another. To make a start, I had to sacrifice some hard-won achievements and joys. For instance colour, about which I had only recently ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... creatures so their hatchlings will have something to eat. Except the other way round, the old self feeding off the young one. All that was left would be the eyes, pleading, trapped behind the eyeholes. It’s a rather sophisticated thought for an eight-year-old to have, but then Smith doesn’t play by the rules and might argue, if arguing were her ...”

“... amused expression curving her full lips; behind her are the banks of the Nile. Bold, unveiled, self-possessed, aglow with inner force, rather eerie, she does indeed seem to be projecting the greatest light into this artist’s dreams. It turns out that he was Mahmoud Saïd, the son of a former prime minister and the uncle of Queen Farida, wife of ...”

“... delicate balance of power collapsed in the third century when the widow of a local warlord, the self-titled Queen Zenobia, launched a campaign of expansion. She reached Antioch in the north and the borders of Egypt in the south before the Emperor Aurelian sacked her city in 273 ce, destroying its trading networks and reducing it to a minor Roman military ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stalks them across Europe. Like all modern myths, the story of Dracula is over-determined and self-contradictory, a stew of obsessions and anxieties rich enough to withstand endless reheating. To some, Dracula is an occult book informed by the late Victorian taste for esotericism. It can be read as a parable of empire and its decline. It is a gift to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”