“... Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas. Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of the disciples, and forgone a life on the quest for the rest. And a good book. Or a decent cause. fear Laird Jnr was a tyke, a terrier. A nit-picker who grew to a hair-splitter, he was not so much scared of his shadow, as of its ...”

“... to complain that the supposedly highly centralised Reich was in practice divided into dozens of self-willed satrapies; fundamentally, one of them despairingly noted, it altogether lacked ‘a functioning government’. Mazower is on slightly safer ground when he notes that German race laws in colonies like Namibia provided a basis for similar regulations in ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in.’ Was this the cinematic debut of the female barrier method? Did anyone other than me find it ...”

“... social ceremonies and mutual courtesies.’ Dickens’s birth takes the form of his father’s ‘self-consciously genteel announcement’ in the local newspapers. The second specimen, a schoolboy letter apologising for an unreturned Latin book, is an early touchstone for his imaginative life, with its whimsical wordplay and elaborate signature. It ...”

“... that began to spread in March, as local administration buildings came under siege and anti-Kiev ‘self-defence militias’ began to form. Many of these protests were the continuation of an ‘anti-Maidan’ movement that emerged late last year – ostensibly in defence of the Yanukovych government, but reinforced by a more powerful rejection of the Maidan’s ...”

“... she was on the tall side and had something of the loose-limbed quality of a comic actor, goofy and self-conscious, good-humoured but perhaps also a bit asexual. Being the product of a postfeminist education, he immediately realises that his assessment is a bit unkind, but justifies himself by recalling that ‘many of his friends were far colder and more ...”

“... reconciliation of conflicting emotional ideas. The poet learns to induce the trance in self-protection whenever he feels unable to resolve an emotional conflict by simple logic … As soon as he has thus dissociated himself from the poem, the secondary phase of composition begins: that of testing and correcting on commonsense principles, so as to ...”

“... said, that can explain why in the last three hundred years or so we in the West have become so self-consciously liberal; liberal about thought itself, the conviction that prompted Nagel’s book, and liberal in our morals and politics. For most of the known human past this hasn’t been so, and we can’t say that our ancestors were benighted or ...”

“... he writes, ‘mirror so clearly the American Dream of Success and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.’ Labor’s bland subtitle, ‘An American Life’, may be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,’ Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has ...”

“... the 1950s and 1960s, and who created the (sometimes accurate) public image of unions as corrupt, self-serving bureaucracies. During the early 1970s, as competition from reconstructed postwar economies brought a decline in the corporate rate of profit, American capital began its migration from industry to finance. Sacking workers became the surest way to ...”

“... than a class party, and the trade unions had incorporated themselves into the polity by their self-abnegating contribution to the war effort. But the actual changes accomplished by Clement Attlee’s administrations were more ambiguous than the new terms of debate made them sound. Civil society and private industry had been left largely unreformed, and ...”

“... The narrator, who is perhaps called Good, accepts the pipe for the first time: ‘I felt my whole self loosening, my mind retreating to a place somewhere around my left ear.’ In their altered state the women take a tour of Bad’s old Brooklyn neighbourhood and visit the museum, where they see a table so long it never seems to end, laid with suggestive and ...”

“... in 1977, Albert Hirschman revisited the 18th-century argument that the pursuit of worldly self-interest might be the most effective way of controlling destructive emotions like anger. The pursuit of interests that are constant and predictable potentially offers an escape from the see-saw effect of trying to curb one passion with another. And because ...”

“... The present-day offence fails – signally – to differentiate between the intervener who, out of self-interest or perversion, helps to ensure that a suicide attempt succeeds, and the individual who, out of compassion, gives a rational fellow being the help he or she needs to end a life that has become medically unbearable. This is what the 1961 Suicide ...”