“... with Dickens and, his favourite, Sheridan Le Fanu. The article ends in a characteristically self-deprecating but also unusually abrupt way: ‘There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.’ Deafening ...”

“... itself, do heavy analytical duty. Clark seems to think that as terms of explanation they are self-evident. Equally irritating are the sneering descriptions of individuals he dislikes or comes to dislike. In the fifth volume, for example, Alfred Deakin, one of the founding fathers of federal Australia and an early prime minister, is Deakin in the first ...”

“... to go to. He had spent 29 years of his life in China, was apparently intelligent, cultivated and self-sufficient, and aside from his impatience with one aspect of official policy seemed very much a product of the high tide of late Victorian and Edwardian imperialism. I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the ...”

“... age of 32. All this might hint at hyper-intensity or emotional desperation. Yet the lifestyles and self-representations of Suckling and his friends have to be viewed warily. We are not yet in the world of Rochester, who would have Puritan rule to react against and a merry monarch to indulge him. There were common sense and realism in Suckling, who mocked the ...”

“... drawn from the everyday world; and both of them could argue their interlocutors into hopeless self-contradiction. For Kurke, acknowledging Aesop’s presence in early Greek thought gives us a better sense of the literary and social tensions in the prose that survives from that era. It is a historical truism that we see the past principally through the ...”

“... only undertaken to tap the potential of the daily but to set out in search of the McGuffin of the self. In La Disparition, that missing e isn’t just a piece of literary gymnastics; sounded as eux, it becomes ‘them’, the disappeared, among them Perec’s parents, his father dead from a gunshot wound while serving in the French army, his mother put on a ...”

“... contrast to the more ‘European’ Greece, caught in an ideological quagmire and bent on economic self-destruction. True, there were ominous signs here and there (Turkey’s denial of the Armenian holocaust; the arrests of journalists; the unresolved status of the Kurds; calls for a greater Turkey which would resuscitate the tradition of the Ottoman ...”

“... The rousing cadences and biblical imagery: Douglass is more than a little Christ-like. He’s all self-assurance and intellectual grandeur, though he is ‘not beyond laughing at himself’; and while his priority is ‘to help crush slavery through peaceful moral persuasion’, McCann shows that his sympathies are wide-ranging. Although he witnessed the ...”

“... a Voltaire quality, and penetrating human stupidity with a sort of ghoulish gusto’. But this self-glorifying irony will be familiar to anyone who knows the column’s style. And neither the critics nor the Abbey audiences seem to have agreed with him. It’s good to have the play back in print, and it’s good to have it sitting alongside so many rare ...”

“... head round it. Words themselves failed me.’ Aubenas largely removes her ‘real’, middle-class self from the narrative, while Toynbee and Ehrenreich reflect often and effectively on the contrast between their normal lives and their temporary ones. When Toynbee, who has spent years rubbing shoulders with the political elite, found herself working at the ...”

“... start with, a melancholy inseparable from Walsh’s late sense of how far he had come from his old self as a writer. Reading his 1964 remarks or his 1977 letter, it’s hard to hang on to the thought that this was once an unpolitical man, who could write of his feelings in June 1956, after Perón had been ousted and gone into exile, that he was not interested ...”

“... remaking. Tragedy need not mean that everything finally collapses into chaos, but that a painful self-dispossession is the condition of any enduring achievement; and in this sense both Marxism and Christianity qualify for the title. Crucifixion may issue in resurrection, but is not annulled by it, any more than the horrors of class society are wiped clean by ...”

“... for many years and the problem is now compounded by the fact that up to 30 per cent of staff are self-isolating at any one time, sometimes simply because someone in their household is showing mild symptoms – a child who may just have a cold, for instance. Doctors who work in other hospital departments are terrified of inadvertently spreading the virus ...”

“... as opposed to an expression of some fundamental identity.Now that we are locking down and self-isolating, we are bound to experience the same sense of disorientation: the same sense of the meaninglessness of large-scale arbitrary death, but also a new perspective on the significance of the repetitive actions of our collective social lives as those ...”

“... in red miners’ overalls – members of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). When the EFF’s self-styled commander in chief, Julius Malema, was announced the applause lasted for three minutes. Then he bellowed his first words: ‘Long live the defiant spirit of Winnie Mandela, long live! Forward to expropriation of land without ...”