“... and it doesn’t help that Karzai is widely seen as indecisive and at the mercy of a cabal of self-interested advisers. Meanwhile, the failure of the government, and of its international allies, to ensure basic security is the single most important cause of public disaffection in Afghanistan. The focus of international attention is the rising number of ...”

“... massive deceleration. Unlike Brodkey, Mars-Jones is witty. So the novel displays an amusing self-consciousness about the sluggishness of its project; time and again, Mars-Jones seems to be nudging us to laugh at Pilcrow. Look at the delighted way John describes his grandmother making scrambled eggs: ‘Nothing seemed to happen, and it kept on not ...”

“... then in girls. Growing up in Honolulu, he was insulated from racial prejudice and even from racial self-consciousness. But there are not very many black people on the island and towards the end of his time there Obama began to be aware of his blackness, not least when he started going to parties and dating. One of the best scenes in the book occurs near the ...”

“... with Elizabeth, who from early in her reign used the progress as one of her chief methods of self-publicity, and went further afield to show herself to her subjects than her father had normally done. Monarchs who went on regular progress were usually successful. It is Elizabeth that we remember as the Virgin Queen, but this was not an unusual image ...”

“... for. Jones is unafraid of simplicity, so his authorial knowingness comes across less as postmodern self-consciousness than as a proper metaphysical parenting of his characters. The stories are at once intensely controlled and loosely digressive, at once focused and a little awkward: Jones’s favourite mode is to centre his narrative on one character and then ...”

“... would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known’ – he wrote in the margin: ‘This is me.’ So in the course of his life he turned down everything from ...”

“... and not unfamiliar atmosphere of xenophobic dread in the American heartland, into a tale of heroic self-defence by a valiant policeman, saving himself – and by extension the heartland – from a terrifying anarchist. (I’m writing this in London, in the week the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry opens; one should stop shaking one’s head at those heartland ...”

“... myself into seeing at Crinan. As Conrad knew, the sea will never go back to its pre-industrial self. In the long run, however, man-made imbalances will settle into new evolutionary equilibria, which may not be to man’s taste or advantage. Eventually the sea will win. In the shorter term, those who love it as much for what it hides as for what it reveals ...”

“... including María, drink in. They dwell on miracles and visions, their imaginations quickened by self-mortification and sleeplessness. María devotes herself to the vida of Sor María de Agreda, a (real) 17th-century nun who specialised in ‘mystical bilocation’. Without leaving her convent in Spain she would convert heathens in New Mexico. Indians told ...”

“... only by their lust for Shakespeareana and their unflaggingly competitive spirit. Enthusiastic, self-taught amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship. They mostly earned their livings in other clerkly trades, as journalists, parliamentary reporters or lawyers. In their ...”

“... a little shy of her strange white visitors, her innate dignity, gentle courtesy and complete self-possession indicate long association with "quality folks".’ When she finally gets to speak for herself, Betty expresses a degree of contentment with – even nostalgia for – her life as a slave. ‘Yesm, we was happy. We got plenty to eat. Marster and ...”

“... most desperate imperial scare, could end up, reworked into fiction, actually bolstering imperial self-confidence. That reworking emerged from the same spirit that turned Paton’s sepoys into Highlanders: an enforced segregation of Indian and Briton, a consolidation of military and political control. The suppression of the mutiny ended the founding fusion of ...”

“... take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other cultural forms, of those who do write – manuscripts and memos, forms and faxes’. In these days of computers, with authors emailing finished manuscripts to publishers (and for all I know ...”

“... from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from Hamlet in that it is true. He went on: ‘I am a historian, not a writer of fiction, and have written the book in the conviction that the duty of a historian is to tell true ...”

“... meanwhile, would have been writing Oliver Twist. While Oates has a very nasty time, largely self-inflicted, Maggs is rescued by a serving girl who brings him to his senses: Maggs should give up on the worthless Phipps and go straight back to his real children in Australia; and he does, taking her with him – not for him Magwitch’s ignominious death ...”