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“... his subjects back their humanity. He shares with us more than their suffering – he reveals their self-respect. It is a measure of Britain’s crisis that the political travelogue survives as a genre despite the high technology and mobility of our ubiquitous media. Now as ever, wordsmiths take to the hinterland to find ‘the people’ – not least ...”

“... did not last long. When the Liberal Administration which came to power in 1906 set about restoring self-government to the former Boer republics, Kipling gave up hope. ‘Isn’t it a holy mess? Less than 5 years after a big war the enemy are given control of the revenues and administration of the conquered country!’ A letter of July 1908 speaks of his recent ...”

“... Cancer must sell almost as many books as cookery: not just old-fashioned self-help guides to detection or prevention, tips on how to survive the chemotherapy or colostomy (now lavishly illustrated with the kinds of photograph that were once allowed only in medical textbooks), but also a vast range of new-style ‘cancer journals ...”

“... this state can be painful, if only because the likes of Casaubon have ‘an equivalent centre of self’ that cannot be ignored. As George Eliot knew, and as McGinn remarks, ‘you have to work to get it right.’ Persons of comparably liberal tendencies will have little difficulty with most of what he says. He dismisses ‘taboo morality’ as ...”

“... that cite the medical or anecdotal literature – gobbets of prose which capture her sense of self, swallowed whole and regurgitated. From the dust-jacket on (Hornbacher is pictured, skinny and sad-eyed), the book has an air of perverse exhibitionism, as if writing about her thinness is a way of keeping her illness alive, albeit in a transmuted ...”

“... his feelings were genuine’ – and ending his story with a bout of masturbation and compulsive self-harming. Henrik’s coda would make a useful introduction to Don Bartlett’s translation of the first instalment of My Struggle, which Knausgaard’s British publishers have called A Death in the Family. In addition to explaining the aura of mystery that ...”

“... from North Carolina, but it was a poor fit for the European sophisticate he’d become, however self-mockingly he inhabited the role. His writing has remained competent and straightforward, but memorable prose was never part of Sedaris’s appeal. He writes like a performer: one senses, reading his essays, that they were destined first and foremost for a ...”

“... struggles to produce the perfect work; Pieces of Light (1998), in which Ulverton makes a self-conscious reappearance; and Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), in which a man tries to write the first definitive novel of the First World War. Thorpe’s artists do not have a good time. The director in Still can’t make his film; the novelist in Nineteen ...”

“... bleeding, to the ground; she kicks him repeatedly in the ribs. The attack – for all its self-abasement – is also a riot of pleasure. ‘When I had had enough I turned to Carla,’ she says, as if she had achieved fulfilment; and then a fantasy unfolds. ‘I wanted to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the scalp the blonde hair, I ...”

“... them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and the public’s greed for the sensational and the exotic fuels it. The mandate of anthropology is so broad that it easily bursts the bounds of strict ...”

“... websites that give themselves a plug. But some authors seem nonplussed by the need for all this self-promotion, distrusting the visitors their sites may attract. ‘If you are a lazy and/or unimaginative journalist,’ A.L. Kennedy chaffs on her website, ‘you may consider using the material contained in these pages to pad out your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Englishness – as the enemy of life, love and any sort of contact with the world that is not self-protective and self-regarding. The sentences I have already quoted from the book may begin to give an idea of how fierce this attack and this regret can be. There is a clue to this development in a magnificent piece in ...”

“... perfectly tenable legal logic founded on originalist principles and what seemed to the Court to be self-evident truths about race. The torture memos produced by Bush’s office of legal counsel are ignoble, immoral and arguably plain wrong; but they are legal arguments. What then, Balkin finally asks, if a politically packed bench, using such arguments, cedes ...”