“... them, why there’s any interest in you in the first place. Debré’s books are postures, the self-fashioning of someone for whom sexuality is a signifier, a carabiner you can clip to your jeans. In the closing section of Name, the narrator has a conversation in a café with a 32-year-old Arab man who has spent a third of his life in prison. As she writes ...”

“... Shouldn’t I be the first to receive the news of what they found? If we had donated her whole self, what would we know now? Everything.Gage’s blood made an inkblot, he had to be read. It is known that he was literate. It is also known that the moment before the accident occurred he opened his mouth to speak. And he did speak again soon afterwards.How ...”

“... and – like the speeches Shakespeare composed for his tragic king – remarkable monuments to his ...”

“... 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 Hamlet achieves manhood, even if with a coarser, colder and more withdrawn self; he becomes what Henry James called ‘finely aware and richly responsible’, as a literary hero for James preferably should be.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 ...”