“... genres of fantasy and children’s literature, in Lord of the Rings or Narnia – has a certain self-sufficient charm. We are given, in Gulliverian style, an entertaining little parody of theological dispute and heresy, as the blemmyae, the headless beings with eyes in their chests, debate the nature of the Incarnation. We are supposed to be thinking that ...”

“... rivals, France and Britain, but the Soviet Union, which was also a loose conglomerate of largely self-governing states, held precariously together by a number of factors of which force was perhaps the least important. The active collaboration of local elites, on which Kamen dwells at length, was clearly crucial, but there were other, more elusive cultural ...”

“... things get rapidly worse, she acquires – like Doctor Glas? – a series habit and a capacity for self-delusion, and he runs away to Copenhagen. Söderberg lived for almost another thirty years, but wrote no more fiction. He wrote about religion, his old bête noire, and history. Unlike Knut Hamsun, he opposed Fascism and Hitler. I like the description – I ...”

“... pornography, it often reads like it, but there is more to Platform than porn. Amid the cynicism, self-loathing and hermetic fucking, love emerges. It is hard to believe this could seem fresh: the story of a couple who start out interested in sex and end up loving each other is a familiar one in art and, indeed, life. Yet it does seem fresh. Perhaps this is ...”

“... to immigrants and prospective immigrants, and with what that reception shows about American self-perceptions and national identity. The discourse of American immigration serves him as a kind of proxy for a larger discourse about the American national character. In both the early and late 20th-century periods, King tells us, immigrants from unfamiliar ...”

“... itself has bequeathed to them.’ Ackroyd’s London is constantly heading towards some kind of self-actualisation, from the establishment of the first London mint in the third century AD (‘testifying once again to the city’s true nature’) to the current success of the City’s foreign exchange markets (which shows London ‘fulfilling its historical ...”

“... and descriptions of islands. Since the Odyssey, islands have been the symbol and substance of ‘a self-contained world’, a function since taken over by the planets of science fiction. Very gradually the globe filled up with land masses; Cosgrove describes how the polar regions were mapped only in the latter half of the 20th century. Alongside the daring ...”

“... is an obsession in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Under Indira Gandhi there was a growth of self-confidence on the part of the underclass in the big towns, and the change of mood had its effect on cricket, which discarded its colonial wardrobe, became more democratic and began to wear the colours of nationalism. In Sri Lanka in the Eighties cricket was ...”

“... To eradicate it he advocated a ban on foreign trade, deindustrialisation and the promotion of a self-sufficient agrarian economy. Far from being committed to the culture of cities, he saw them as a barely necessary evil which should be kept as small and tightly controlled as possible, with a few beautiful monuments and very powerful fortifications. Nor was ...”

“... increasingly towards Elizabeth’s imagined private as opposed to her well-documented public self, spiralling into speculations about a hidden love life – usually in terms of relations with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, or even Thomas Seymour, her abuser when she was 14. Once initiated, fantasies of this kind, which ...”

“... free their tangled members is for one of them to bite his off at the base. From that moment, the self-castrated slug is female-only. Sometimes a male xylocoris, a close relative of the bedbug, will rape another male. Its sperm will make its way to the victim’s vas deferens, where sperm are stored. The next time the raped male inseminates a female, the ...”

“... of being a bit wet. He doesn’t drone on about how empty life is among the smart set in a bitter, self-lacerating way; he uses his novels to search for alternatives, even if he never finds any that stand up. The politics of Generation X, for example, were amazingly silly and narcissistic. The idea was that life was uniquely hard for middle-class Americans ...”

“... 97 per cent of our genome is ‘genetic junk’, a palimpsest of useless DNA from ancient viruses, self-replicating remnants of genes no longer functional, and ‘jumping genes’ that spread regardless of the welfare of their carriers. As Ridley observes, ‘our genomes badly need worming.’ There are further intriguing lessons about genetic conflict ...”

“... and shaped’ by the pressures of their milieu; their careers ‘lose the linear and self-propelled trajectory assumed by biography’, and as only a handful can ‘impose themselves sufficiently and for long enough to affect the course and character of a political system, so only a few deserve more biographical attention than can be supplied by ...”

“... as jacket copy, though Empson once said it was ‘hopelessly bad’. It is worth attending to his self-judgments; he is often hard on his own work, but if he thought it deserved praise he gave it unstintedly and perceptively, as when he celebrated The Structure of Complex Words as his masterpiece. His condemnation of ‘Let it go’ seems to have been caused ...”