“... consulted various people in an attempt to understand his experiences, he performs – slightly self-consciously – a cleansing ceremony with his ex-wife, wafting burning sage around the house. With his new girlfriend he also gives the house a lick of paint and replaces window frames and floorboards. This seems to stop the slugs and rats getting in. And it ...”

“... to view each other with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection.’ In her essay ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger’, from 1983, she expanded this argument:From [birth] we have been steeped in hatred – for our colour, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to ...”

“... of them well educated and middle class, was attracting large audiences by emphasising aspiration, self-betterment and respectability. In what seems to have been a wildly misguided effort to be taken seriously again, Wedderburn published a pamphlet arguing that permitting enslaved labourers to purchase their own freedom over time was preferable to immediate ...”

“... through lax immigration laws to get all they can out of America and bring nothing but filth and self-interest’. The letter is dated 26 June 1952 and written on notepaper from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City – at that time a prestigious address, but more recently used to house asylum seekers. It was occasioned by Truman’s decision to veto ...”

“... that still prevailed in the 1970s. In the decades since then, Reid asserts, the ‘apparently self-evident … merits of Keynesianism and deficit financing have been displaced’. But even this restates what Marquand himself wrote in 2004 in a re-evaluation of MacDonald’s life, admitting that his earlier criticisms had been moulded by the ‘equally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... meet Princess Caroline. He went reluctantly and tried to shrug off his interest in royalty in his self-reflective ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’ (1739): he ‘with Princes kept a due Decorum/but never stood in Awe before ’em’. He was more interested, Grant writes, in the brutality that ‘hovered just beneath the surface of early 18th-century ...”

“... after the First World War, but there was no Nuremberg-style tribunal. Italians bought into a self-serving narrative: that Mussolini’s regime was, as Gundle puts it, ‘a mild form of dictatorship compared to Nazi Germany, that its colonial wars were motivated by civilising ideals, that it achieved much in the realm of social reform and welfare, that it ...”

“... of amusement, sadness, anger and frustration, although he stopped short of attributing to it self-awareness or aesthetic sense. Like all savages, he wrote, orangutans were unmoved by music. Another specimen, purchased at enormous cost in 1836 (3500 francs, almost twice Cuvier’s salary) and called Jack, was capable of playing games, using a ...”

“... New York, living on less than a dollar a day and reciting his work on street corners. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound aged 26. Yet he was prolific and industrious, publishing his own and other people’s work through his Renegade Press and launching probably the most innovative of the 1960s mimeo magazines, the Marrahwanna Quarterly. It became a ...”

“... isn’t the only recent example of war fiction designed to raise the alarm about Russia. In their self-published Atlantic Resolve, John Pierson and Thomas Newman, two US army veterans, imagine a similar invasion of Estonia. In their narrative, the Ukraine war ended in an unstable ceasefire forced on Zelensky by the US. As in Masala’s scenario, Putin is ...”

“... were also pretexts for fancy dress. Left unexamined is why, as Jonson reported with a touch of self-exculpation, ‘it was Her Majesty’s will to have them black-moors.’Distinction on the basis of bodily characteristics flourished well before modern race theory. In earlier centuries, complexion – the interaction of Galenic humours – was thought to ...”

“... is its closing chiasmus: ‘So let me lie,/The grass below; above the vaulted sky.’ The self drifts ‘like vapours tost’, so the lines could suggest, as in ‘An Invite to Eternity’, wraith-like orbiting above both grass and sky, or, more obviously, the poet lying on a tussock with the sky above him.The verse Clare wrote at Northampton was ...”

“... The church clock is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my ...”

“... a love story. The real romance is not the one between Edwards and the extremely peculiar Hunter, a self-described ‘truth seeker’ and ‘old soul’ who needs to call her psychic guru back in California before she can decide whether to have Russian dressing with her Reuben sandwich. The love is between Young and Edwards, even though from the start it is ...”