“... 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 ...”

“... for enlarged state provision in all Western countries are now increasingly framed in terms, not of self-realisation and higher ends, but of consumer satisfactions and individualised private rights. A rather different range of binary contrasts, but one that similarly links timeless questions of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional ...”

“... with days in fetters, weeks in solitary confinement or the whip. These years were crucial to his self-mythology; the most famous image of him on the islands depicts him in chains, forced to turn a heavy oil press in the sun. This is the picture on the cover of the ‘Veer Savarkar’ edition of the popular children’s comic Amar Chitra Katha, published in ...”

“... confessions’ which are not – non-spoiler alert – particularly confessional. A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, he announces in the first pages: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.’Born to a working-class family, Whitman fashioned ...”

“... William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one another.Among the ...”

“... from the fact that he was the same bullying braggart on stage and off. He didn’t hide his true self from the voters. Harris discovered that this was not the case. ‘I’d readied myself for a phone conversation with Mr Hyde,’ she writes. ‘But Dr Jekyll had picked up the call.’ In other words, the man is a hypocrite. But Harris doesn’t say what an ...”