“... what d’ya mean? We’re not Irish – we’re British.’ They laughed at each other, but rather self-consciously. It was obvious they were discomfited, unsettled, and they flung themselves with increased vigour into another round of furious and distracting activity. This fascinating story follows a subtle and intelligent discussion of Loyalist ...”

“... Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this ...”

“... a lot of people at the time. Unless you were willing to plough through huge volumes on workers’ self-management, the rise and fall of the non-aligned movement or tendentious biographies of Tito, there wasn’t much to read about Yugoslavia. Class, not ethnicity, was what most academics had been interested in during the Cold War, but now nationalism was the ...”

“... movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in ...”

“... glossed over. No doubt Barney herself did much to prompt the prevailing euphoria. She was a born self-publicist and mythomane: a seductress of astonishing (and candid) appetites, the self-appointed doyenne of ‘Greek’ loves, a blowsy, billowy, impossibly garrulous cheerleader for la vie sapphique. (‘I want to be the ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the ...”

“... each of us) better off, while making nobody worse off. Everyone’s a winner. It’s here that Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s argument cuts in. Their main target is the pursuit of growth for its own sake which, as they say, has become dogma for politicians across the globe: certainly ‘mainstream’ politicians usually assume that when it comes to ...”

“... hand, watching the birds and animals before beginning his chores. This is how a father should be, self-possessed, reserved, with ‘nothing to say, nothing to show, nothing to prove’. When Mike asks about his own father, he says: ‘He’s dead’ – knowing that he has given a far from complete account of his condition. When a man becomes a father he ...”

“... render belated homage, and I will never forgive myself for this failure.’ The tone is not just self-abasing (‘I quail before de Gaulle. He is the Great Other, the inaccessible absolute’ etc), but self-flagellating. What Debray can’t get over is that for most of his life ‘De Gaulle just made us snigger’: he was ...”

“... based on class. This is reflected in every aspect of their branding, packaging, advertising and self-image: Marks & Spencer’s is very middle-class, Sainsbury’s is middle-class, Tesco is careful to track the aspirations of the British mass market, and Asda is more like its former, cheap-but-cheerful self than it is ...”

“... in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts as self-contained structures, accepted only internal evidence, and ignored cultural context. The division of labour between textual editors and literary critics made no sense to him, because ‘the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic ...”