“... of empire, helping to define the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In ...”

“... addressed as if it were produced in a void, and each individual novel is treated as if it were self-sufficient, and bore little relation to anything beyond the reality, or fantasy, that it described. When critics look into Narayan’s work, it’s as if they see only themselves: the ‘timeless India’ they discover in his fiction is a mirror, or a ...”

“... practices and institutions which embodied both this ‘universal’ patriotism and a desire for self-improvement were forged from a sturdy amalgam of tradition, religious observance, deference, support of the military, pride, dislike of change and adherence to class and community. The brass band movement in particular conformed to Orwell’s view of ...”

“... 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee also ...”

“... full of irritating sub-Joycean rhymes and puns, seem the work of a writer struggling to fulfil his self-imposed schema. Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s third novel, has the most elaborate schema of all: six narratives embedded one within another, like a set of Russian dolls. The journal of an American notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s is interrupted ...”

“... about welfare are likely to focus on the extent to which depending on others has to erode the self-respect of recipients and undermine the respect others have for them. Sennett thinks it quite possible for welfare agents, social workers and volunteers to treat their clients with respect, but doing so requires that they not blot out or occlude the ...”

“... that the existence of slavery undercut the moral legitimacy of the white South’s claim to self-determination. Fair enough, except that the same could be said of the Revolutionaries of 1776, most of whom were slaveholders. In the end, Farber’s discussion of secession reveals the enduring power of Lincoln’s idea that the US is not like other ...”

“... was not going to be numbered among the great American writers of her generation. The gloomy and self-dramatising tone is characteristic. In fact she was exceptionally robust, and nothing could break her. She went on writing for years, and lived to see a flurry of interest in her work before she died in 1902. But she never earned the public recognition she ...”

“... of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel). She never had an exhibition of photographs in her lifetime, and they hardly circulated. Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne ...”

“... L’Étudiant noir in which he railed against assimilation as a route towards emancipation: the self-hatred and cowardice at the heart of ‘assimilation’ would never, he wrote, lead to true freedom for Black people under colonial rule. In Return to My Native Land, Césaire coined the term ‘négritude’ – broadly, ‘Blackness’ or ...”

“... an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ‘views’, or upon their self-appointed role in society. Their legend is personal, not exemplary, and their achievement as poets is not a sort of holy collaboration with the national soul, a struggle requiring the poet to present himself as both prophet and sacrifice. And of course they ...”

“... grandparents, in whose eyes Lennon had blown it by becoming the person he is in this interview: self-engrossed, witty, malicious, foolish – someone who is always ready to be disabused and reabused, obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin, aloft between frying pan and fire and flipping like a dervish pancake, yet equally convinced of a redemptive ...”

“... the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud’ – caricatures intended to self-destruct on being read. She lays out a stall of biographical red herrings and holds each one up for our inspection. She finds a form of life-writing a bit like wild analysis: the theories are summarily paraphrased, case histories are scrambled in the ...”

“... than themselves. In its literature, Rose writes, the nascent Archaic polis is revealed as the self-serving construct of an aristocracy determined to protect its control of resources by preventing any single leader from growing too powerful. Its exploitation of a poorer but now partly self-conscious demos drives the next ...”

“... this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that Israel’s reason for escalating this punitive regime to a new level of severity was to cause the overthrow of Hamas after its 2007 seizure of power in Gaza. The claim doesn’t stand up to serious ...”