“... sleek digital renderings of the palace’s interiors and furnishings. The architectural style is self-aggrandisingly imperial, from the marble floors to the baroque frescoes adorning the ceilings. Film buffs will enjoy the moment when Navalny recognises the double-headed eagle atop the entrance gates from the storming of the Winter Palace in Sergei ...”

“... them. A study by King’s College London showed that, while 70 per cent of people said they would self-isolate if necessary, only 18 per cent did so.People not getting tested because they can’t afford to quarantine will keep a low profile. But other groups aren’t keen to catch the attention of anyone in authority. Graham Tegg, the director of the Kent Law ...”

“... the form of the ‘ordeal’ (the original is The Ordeal of Richard Feverel), the rocky climb to self-understanding. Harry’s ordeal is his father. It is only when he hardens into a separate personality, sealing off those ‘treasure-pits’ in his nature, that Roy stops puffing and the novel can end.One of Meredith’s most interesting narrative dodges ...”

“... stooge … No, not me; I’m queer. I’m queer for myself, for my selfhood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, queer with strange appetites, and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colours and sizes, queer for their tastes …And so forth. It’s a given that you’ll be on Zachary’s side ...”

“... killed my child.’ After being bullied on the platform and then flooded with content to do with self-harm, a Muslim girl attempted suicide. Maryam, having to deal with the media attention and the trending hashtag #JusticeForTahera, goes on the offensive. A colleague digs up an incriminating photo of Tahera’s father, the ‘nation’s favourite ...”

“... responds that since Hamas’s declared intention is to destroy it, Israel’s right of self-defence extends to the destruction of Hamas, regardless of the cost to life: another Holocaust is underway and must be prevented, and any action it takes becomes proportionate because of the imperative to prevent such an outcome. All those who disagree ...”

“... would in fact make more sense in the post-1919 world of the Comintern, as questions of national self-determination took on revolutionary importance in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Connolly might well have flourished in this context, but in 1916 he was ahead of his time. The reconquest of Ireland that he desired could be achieved because the ...”

“... to go one better than the vieux riches, who always own everything anyway. Harpers & Queen, the self-appointed arbiter of these matters this side of the herring-pond, identifies the strivers peremptorily as Noovos, or Noovs. There is something a touch Yellowplush Papers about all this, but there you go. It would seem that The Official Foodie Handbook is an ...”

“... military in 2022 rather than calling for a general election. I’m told that Nawaz Sharif (then in self-exile in London, fleeing from the many court cases against him, since he too fell out with the army) advised his younger brother, Shahbaz, to do precisely that, but Shahbaz wanted to be prime minister and did what the army asked. He will have another chance ...”

“... and state power, and Freud’s theory of the double (‘an insurance against the extinction of the self’). At moments along the way, Cummings might provide a breathless history of alphabets or Islamic calligraphy. Several reviews of Bibliophobia have expressed an admiring bafflement. But mostly the results are explosively interesting: things far apart in ...”

“... soldiers, though one of them, a new arrival, Agnes, is not a fellow at all.Agnes’s strength and self-containment remind him of Nkechi, his childhood friend; despite their long separation, he still harbours romantic feelings for her. When relations with Agnes become more intimate, he’s baffled. ‘Why does she like me?’ he asks Felix, who has an earnest ...”

“... of the novel’s revenge action seems to belong on the screen. Throughout, there are nods to film, self-conscious references to the cinematic nature of chases and kills. Hornclaw, lurking unnoticed in the subway, ‘exists like an extra in a movie’, as if peripheral to her own slasher plot; when she and Bullfight meet for their final showdown in an abandoned ...”

“... as opposed to Holy/Ghost’. The internal rhyme between ‘host’ and ‘Ghost’ seems like self-inflicted injury, the manifestation of a masochistic desire to be disfigured. But the logic of this poem, and the final rhyming couplet in which that logic is encoded, is that internalising pain is preparation for letting it go: ‘when I have been suffering ...”

“... in 610 BC, long before the word ‘philosophy’ was coined: such antiquity freed him from the self-consciousness that constrained later philosophers. Unlike uptight Plato and obsessive Aristotle, whom Nietzsche dismissed as having survived accidentally, Anaximander was a free thinker, voyaging through new constellations of thought. He was far from ...”

“... bullshit (her narrative contains lots of two-column lists), she decides that although Celine’s self-deception requires more ‘cognitive energy’ than her own determined hedonism, it doesn’t produce better results. What neither of them seems to want is clarity: ‘You don’t always need the full story,’ Celine says. Accordingly, Phoebe refrains for ...”