“... of the subterfuge for himself. The sense of dread he conveys is authentic – it is a loss of self, of connection to the world. Romand’s actions seem an extrusion of this vacuity, a radical kind of thoughtlessness. Yet Carrère largely eschews forensic speculation: had he presented Romand as a psychopath with obscurely Oedipal fears and a megalomaniac ...”

“... do not disappoint. They both present their works as spirited acts of defiance, therapeutic self-explorations, terrifically difficult journeys inspired by, of all things, mother-love: ‘After my son was born,’ Margaret Salinger writes, I felt an urgency to make my way through the magic and miasma alike, through both history and fiction, to figure ...”

“... literary allusions, and yet barely a cadence or a phrase sounds derived. He seems as a poet not self-invented, which would be too knowing, but self-conceived. Like the idea of ‘new weather’, the title of his first extraordinary book, his poetry seems impossibly original. The End of the Poem attempts to show us how ...”

“... of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises political journalists, a recovering drunk of the type that is angry with everybody all the time, a foul-mouthed natural bully who genuinely hated most of the people it was his job to deal with on a daily basis, and made no secret of ...”

“... settled into the comforting mythology of the heroism of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the self-sacrifice of Florence Nightingale’? Surely the whole point of the Light Brigade story is that ‘someone had blundered.’ I can detect little eagerness to cover up the extent of the failures either then or now. As early as 23 December 1854 – before the ...”

“... south, by contrast, was colonised by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats, whose wealth and self-image relied heavily on the existence of a highly stratified native labour force, through whom they sought to create a world of feudal privilege of a sort fast disappearing in Europe itself. They entrusted local administration, and the all-important task of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... assaulting the greed of the ‘masters of mankind’; John Stuart Mill and John Dewey advocating self-development and workers’ control of production. In contrast to 20th-century liberalism’s reliance on managerial expertise, Smith’s liberalism mingled with his moral philosophy, which postulated an innate moral sense in every human being. Chomsky ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who work for such online platforms as Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo are classed not as employees but as self-employed. They are supposedly flexible entrepreneurs, free to choose when they work, how they work and who they work for. In practice, this isn’t the case. Unlike performers in the entertainment industry (which gives the ‘gig’ economy its name), most ...”

“... become a happy person, or a good painter, if I stayed.’ She bought a lynx stole and painted a self-portrait with it slung over her shoulders: she looks haughty, glamorous, free. At the time of the move, she thought she might be pregnant and wrote to a friend that ‘a kind of strange, calm “can’t be bothered” is growing in me, with a strong sense of ...”

“... But, in the end, what seems to have changed is the idea of the Mediterranean. Unlike his younger self, the veteran Church seems out of place in Fernand Braudel’s ‘Middle Sea’, where ‘the Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian [and] the whole sea shared a common destiny.’As Julia Clancy-Smith has shown, the ...”