“... interested in the way Megan’s mind worked. Their exchanges, in which CG gently probes at the self-serving illogic of Westboro theology while Megan observes herself growing steadily more susceptible to his flattering curiosity, take on the quality of a courtship in a very old-fashioned novel, where surface enmity fuels mutual attraction and careful ...”

“... has never given a transparent account of its finances or its members. It claims exemption as a self-styled ‘cultural organisation’ – or, on occasion, ‘charity’ – even though it isn’t at all clear whether it has ever registered itself as such.The RSS has also normalised Hindu nationalist violence. In 2014, around the time of the election, a ...”

“... book ends with her spending the night in a ditch, where she’s visited by a vision of her former self, echoing an image of her mother from the beginning of the book, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The extent of Wray’s foreshadowing – which touches most aspects of the novel’s plot – makes the ending feel like a conspiracy. Perhaps it’s paranoid to say ...”

“... of scribbling women’ – had not received the highest literary accolades. Only unyielding male self-interest could explain why the impulse to reform that had hastened the Civil War was not allowed to reach fruition, and why women were forced back into their separate sphere. The passage of time and, especially, the appearance of biographies of the leading ...”

“... as it were through the spine or the outside of a book to what it contains, remembering the past self that read the book (or that bought the book with the intention of reading it one day) and re-experiencing the feeling of reading it for the first time. There’s a latent knowledge or an association of memories that gets released by that or by the book’s ...”

“... want with their long-term partners is no less corrosive, no less demeaning to their sense of self, than ‘rape’ as we usually talk about it (correct or not, this is a very different, and serious, point). It is also true that she suggested, in response to a question from the audience, that two hundred hours of community service might be an appropriate ...”

“... Guiana to visit a spider museum; and round again to Putin. On stage, she was less fierce and self-possessed than the figure I remembered at an FN open-air rally in Paris in 2012. She wasn’t helped by the party’s stage managers, whose son-et-lumière seemed to diminish their leader: the overused music – Ravel’s Bolero – the flashing lights, the ...”

“... alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of the subjective life’. Hegel’s followers, epigones and incomprehenders (his prose does make it easy to be one of those) turned lyric into the mode in which poets represented the operations of consciousness and creativity. Spirit strutted its ...”

“... climbers. Alternately puffed up and slapped down, his temperament developed into a mixture of self-doubt and ambivalence interlaced with short-lived bursts of enthusiasm and fits of petulance. Not naturally empathetic or a particularly good judge of character, he was not saved by friendships or by having any single outstanding ability. At Cambridge, where ...”

“... For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that comprises the northern part of Somalia – thousands of sheep and goats lay strewn in varying states of decay. The contents of their stomachs, it was easy to see, were mainly colourful shreds of plastic ingested in the ...”

“... on the coast at Lyme Regis were instrumental in the development of palaeontology. Anning’s self-taught expertise, her subtle interpretation of fossils, and her many notable discoveries (including the ichthyosaur) made her one of the first authorities in the nascent discipline. But as a woman she couldn’t join the Geological Society of London and De ...”

“... to biographers, but it’s difficult not to read one of her earliest poems, ‘Lament’, as a self-epitaph in the tradition of Villon, Corbière and her fictional contemporary Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: I am an exiled king without his crown, A dying poet with a tattered mask, A starving beggar who may nothing ask, And a religion that has been cast ...”

“... of him, Phillips’s friends and associates are less careful, describing him as a bombastic, self-congratulatory boor and ‘full of shit’ when he’d ‘had a few’, which was often. The book is long, and the last third of it, like Phillips’s life, is much less interesting than the rest. Phillips enjoyed himself in later life, driving around ...”

“... Kotkin has no real answer. He concedes that Stalin may well have wanted to get rid of ‘evasive, self-serving’ bureaucrats and replace tired, ill-educated Old Bolsheviks with young promotees with better education, but, as Kotkin rightly points out, ‘Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.’ He does ...”

“... al-Omar oilfield, the largest in the country. Turkey was never going to accept any form of Kurdish self-determination in Syria, though the Kurds argue that they are only asking for a federal system in which they have a high degree of autonomy – not independence. Turkey has long wanted to intervene militarily in Syria, but so long as the US and Russia opposed ...”