“... out of storage, which he hopes to raise by selling Alex’s last confession, a coked-up monologue self-recorded onto three videotapes.Despentes wrote Vernon Subutex almost in real time. The first book appeared in France on 7 January 2015 – the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings – and the third in 2017. The trilogy has been a huge commercial success and ...”

“... a large number of arrests. His message, that Putin and his clan are not sincere nationalists but self-interested thieves, is essentially a conservative one, which is the reason that it’s threatening.The US and European national security establishment has unsurprisingly sought to frame the scandal in a way that suits them. In Britain, the Royal United ...”

“... the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied corpses pervading the city. His oracle is both a political prophecy about ...”

“... in which Russians, Jews, Poles and others would enjoy the ‘autonomy to guarantee their own self-government in all matters of their national life’. It was a brief but genuine moment of harmony. Ukraine’s first prime minister, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a peasant-born writer with a revolutionary background, even had a Jewish wife. Then it all fell ...”

“... of India. But it works exquisitely well for 1848 because there has never been a more garrulous or self-reflective revolution. Everywhere in Europe, the personal testimony produced in such prodigious quantities by the protagonists reveals a remarkable intensity of historical awareness. This was one important difference between 1848 and 1789: contemporaries of ...”

“... while Brexit and Trump were upending what dissent might look like. But this makes the books more self-reflective and ethically troubled – and the better for it.Battles of Conscience opens with a surprising statistic: that sixty thousand Britons refused conscription in the Second World War – three times the number who objected in the First. There is a ...”

“... I had come to embrace the feeling and had begun to think of it as my essential nature, my true self.’ He reminded me of Cal Trask, the Cain figure – the ‘wicked’ brother – at the heart of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.Banks would have been pleased by the comparison, citing Steinbeck, along with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, Nelson Algren ...”

“... been one of strong moral condemnation: to declare oneself a confirmed Delian today is hardly less self-defamatory than to admit to being an addict of cocaine or marihuana.’ Thanks to the sustained efforts of musicians such as Cooke, however, the tide has gradually turned. Delius may still be divisive, but his fans have grown in number. There is now a Delius ...”

“... his (female) cousin Bichonnade in mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the ...”

“... who hopes for a scenario in which tackling abuse is brought into alignment with institutional self-interest is placing too much faith in the market solution. As evidenced by the chimera of ‘corporate social responsibility’ – or, for that matter, by the current handling of sexual harassment complaints – the market incentivises the appearance of ...”

“... truly obscure rumination on the names given to horses, cattle, dogs and cats – as ‘triumphs of self-parody … far-fetched enough to make a psychoanalyst blush’. With​ the main theme announced, the book sets out to demonstrate the way concrete science operates in practice. Lévi-Strauss is interested in the logic of classification: where the Linnaean ...”

“... stand beside a single red square, bringing ‘a strange counterbalance of human silliness and self-importance’, as she put it, to the austerity of the image. Finally, the forms become stranger. Limbs shrink, bodies stretch, faces become fronded or cubist, less comical, more expressive. One critic called them ‘modern cave paintings’, which Franciszka ...”

“... reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing’). He wishes to enlarge the self, but nobody in the army ever did well out of wanting more selfhood – the idea is to submit yourself to the company. Royals calm themselves with a similar sense of mission. He wants to improve, but the question posed by his book is how he might honestly ...”

“... from decisions made off the cuff and on the hoof.Characters step off the page: Marmaduke Rawdon, a self-made hippomaniac whose motto was ‘Win gold and wear gold’ (and whose family later made a fortune off the backs of slaves in Barbados); the tolerant chaplain Thomas Fuller, who looked like a butcher and was ‘the perfect walking library’; and John ...”

“... and bathos. The best guide for the perplexed is to be found in Monty Python’s sketch about the self-made Yorkshire businessmen all loafing around and vying with each other over the hardships of their upbringing. Meacher, in a tussle for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, gave the impression that his father had been a farm worker. He succeeded in ...”