“... and wears its autobiographical elements (literally) on its sleeve, but it is also self-consciously a work of fiction, because the narrator – and no doubt the author, too, though it makes things simpler to do both him and his book the courtesy of maintaining the fiction that it’s fiction – has learned from his father’s negative example ...”

“... aren’t worth marrying.’Vance thinks that the ‘trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt’. He’s often unsure that he’s doing the right thing, or that he really believes what he believes. One of the more remarkable sentences in Hillbilly Elegy is ‘I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay.’ Before becoming a ...”

“... to westward conquest to cops keeping the streets safe, guns are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ They ...”

“... never properly command. Hamlet achieves manhood, even if with a coarser, colder and more withdrawn self; he becomes what Henry James called ‘finely aware and richly responsible’, as a literary hero for James preferably should be. This is beyond Henry’s ken. It may also be a sign of the tragedy’s formidable solidity, a statement about the cost of living ...”

“... to the Thistle, where those identified as being at high risk of death are prescribed diamorphine, self-administered under supervision. The diamorphine leaves him ‘gouching’ – drowsy and lethargic – which makes it harder to beg. ‘People see me asleep and they think: “He’s a smackhead,” which is true.’ But his use of the EDTS means he is using ...”

“... judge, brokerage merely shifted unions from love and affection to the ‘still honest domain of self-interested transactions’.But this emerging legal consensus didn’t hold. The following year, a case involving one of Foy’s competitors, André-Constant Foubert, went before France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation, which ruled that matchmakers ...”

“... of Pearl, is otherwise unattested in Middle English, and that the scribe’s handwriting looks self-consciously archaic by the standards of the late 14th century. But no amount of knowledge about medieval literary culture can make the Pearl Manuscript tell us what it means. Everyone has to speculate at some point. There is no textual evidence that the ...”

“... critical of anything Christian or Jewish, but not beyond.’ Later in the programme, Lewis – a self-described Orientalist – offered an opinion he claimed was controversial but was in fact representative of much Western writing on slavery in Muslim societies, including his own book Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990). Arab participation in the ...”

“... of them even highly original, they occur incidentally, almost accidentally, and the author’s self-imposed commandment not to say anything that might be ‘beyond’ any reader provides some readers with the heartening illusion that beyond what Antony Hopkins is saying, there’s nothing to say. To the music-loving amateur reader of the present review, I ...”

“... of Archbishop Williams, whose indomitable combination of deviousness, obsequiousness and self-importance spreads through the book like a running gag.) Mr Hutton writes memorably about mobile forces: about the rival armies questing each other across Warwickshire ‘like two great blind moles’ in the days before Edgehill, or about Charles’s army on ...”

“... at how lightly Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet of yes-men have got off. But then the Eye’s current self-image – of stout, no-nonsense, undeceivable conservative Englishness – isn’t so very far away from that of the Prime Minister herself. In a couple of years’ time, no doubt, the magazine will open its own wine club, and then we shall all know exactly ...”

“... Professor Hsu, a Cantonese, had gone to the States as a labourer when he was a teenager. He was self-taught in English, had financed his own studies and had become a professor of English. With the birth of the new China, he came back with his whole family and had been working as a teacher of the language. His English was much better than his Chinese – his ...”

“... was a close-run thing, for all the decisiveness of the eventual victory. Despite its bravery and self-sacrifice, the Argentinian air force failed to exploit its opportunities against the carriers and liners, and at San Carlos – as General Moore admitted – there could have been a disaster had the enemy concentrated on the landing craft rather than the ...”

“... but there was also an ideological and intellectual anti-semitism. Some people derive a sort of self-justification from denouncing Jews and from creating or sustaining an anti-Jewish mythology; and this was made more respectable – or systematic – by a number of left-wing thinkers who were known to be anti-semitic: Fourier, Toussenel and Proudhon all ...”

“... It is no longer ‘a pleasure to go down into the stations of the Underground’. Rasmussen’s self-confessed Whiggism now seems more distorting than illuminating. Selectivity may be necessary in writing about London, but what conviction can a general argument about the city carry which is made by ignoring slums, suburbs and poverty, as well as ...”