“... woman whose protagonist is a nonconforming young man. The two examine childhood, parenthood and self-determination, at a time when true autonomy is rare. The British novel reads like a socialist manifesto: simple workers try to lead honest lives and evil landowners manipulate them; its nuance comes in depictions of the natural environment and its attention ...”

“... black bourgeoisie the Garland men are noted for their reserve, outward propriety and aristocratic self-regard. Talcott has spent his life living up to the Garland ideal and is expected to redeem the Garland family name. He followed his father into the law and teaches at their shared alma mater, Elm Harbor (a lightly fictionalised Yale Law School). Unlike his ...”

“... empire. They reject the popular idea that Americans go to war only as a last resort, motivated by self-defence or the desire to preserve and spread freedom rather than national aggrandisement. ‘Good wars’, like the Revolution and World War Two, which seem to fit this model, are memorialised in Washington, Hollywood films and national bestsellers. Anderson ...”

“... age superstitions: astrology, palmistry, the reading of auras and energies, and the twin goals of self-development and self-enhancement. Mantel wryly deflates the pretensions and the language of spiritualism: one of Al’s bitterest regrets is that Morris is so vulgar and cruel, while ‘other mediums have spirit guides ...”

“... poem with Derrida’s employment of concepts sous rature’; and ‘the Commedia is a foray into self-consciously “virtual reality”.’ On religion: after the invention of printing, ‘it became easier to feel that you had “finished” the Bible as you might finish an Agatha Christie, and correspondingly easier to think of the sacred writings as like a ...”

“... are harsh lyrics about promise and failure, and even the title of ‘I Had a Future’ admits self-doubt. Among these poems, however, are also the triumphantly assertive lyric manifestos of ‘Kerr’s Ass’, ‘Innocence’, ‘The Hospital’, and ‘Epic’, which begins: I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided: who ...”

“... peers and lawyers who have long experience of human rights cases, argued that the ordinary law of self-defence was a guide to what Israel could lawfully do, which means that, like an individual faced with a threat to their life, a state can do what it needs to do to survive. As Pannick and Macdonald put it, ‘criminal law understands that if people, in ...”

“... of the religiously pluralistic world in which we now live. His interest in excavating evidence of self-professed atheists stands in counterpoint to Lucien Febvre’s celebrated claim that unbelief (l’incroyance) was a philosophical and logical impossibility in the 16th century. The long shadow cast by Febvre’s thesis has not only inhibited serious ...”

“... 1960s was among other things a prophetic critique of today’s brutally philistine universities, self-avowed service stations for the capitalist economy.If some theory had revolutionary implications, it was because it pressed that soulless logic through to the humanities themselves. They were no longer to be seen as a preserve of personal value and spiritual ...”

“... people and movements by their position on globalisation. Her use of this term is, she admits, ‘self-consciously anachronistic’. Her interwar ‘globalists’ were often internationalists seeking to promote transnational regulation or co-operation; her ‘anti-globalists’, too, identified as nationalists or socialists (or, worse, National ...”

“... to corruption still matter – opportunities for graft are plentiful – though thuggish self-advancement is hardly rare. Despite a few halting steps towards devolving power in Britain, England itself remains a profoundly centralised country, in which national politics always dominates. So why not send a national message?Starmer implored voters to ...”

“... his life and craft recruited and then annihilated in the course of someone else’s exercise in self-negation? It’s one thing to erase yourself from time, but another to disappear someone else along with you. What happens to injustice when nobody ever knows of it?All these questions are at stake when we address ourselves to the idea of the end times. Does ...”

“... Keynesians and monetarists is not the role of money but beliefs as to whether the economy is self-regulating and will, if left alone, quickly return to full employment. For Keynesians, aggregate demand is not self-regulating but must be corrected with either monetary or fiscal policies. For the monetarists, no such ...”

“... Beatrice records this renunciation of her own possible motherhood without a flicker of emotion or self-pity and goes on to urge that married women should also make the most of their intellectual faculties. ‘It pains me,’ she writes, ‘to see a fine intelligent girl, directly she marries, putting aside intellectual things as no longer pertinent to her ...”

“... her father look at himself in a mirror. It never crossed his mind, she supposes, to keep a diary. Self-regard was no evident part of his nature. In a conductor that must be remarkable. Combining limitless executive power with the opportunity ritualistically to display it in public, the modern practice of conducting is wonderfully adapted to the expression of ...”