“... workers as ‘human capital’. Ultimately, the ideal non-smoker merged with the neoliberal self, who measures his health with precision, and implicitly his morality too. ‘This politics of bodily evaluation dovetailed with market-centric judgments of the body politic,’ Milov writes; the state’s performance was increasingly subject to market ...”

“... without dogma; art without indulgence: it was all a bit strenuous, and a touch of complacent self-importance was never far away. Reading him in bulk, one registers a somewhat heavy, upholstered, Second Empire feel to much of his prose. It wasn’t, to put it mildly, marked by playfulness. Speaking as the Voice of Reason and Science apparently doesn’t ...”

“... philosophical and literary aspects remains Dennis Todd’s Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in 18th-Century England (1995), which is especially good at navigating all those vehement and contradictory pamphlets. Harvey’s comparatively brief study is more modest in scope, her new archival research helping to situate the episode within the local ...”

“... imperialism, since it monopolised the entire system of representation, but that he could express self-consciousness as an outsider. No degree of estrangement, however, was sufficient to save Conrad from interpreting the world according to the racist order of his time. Considering her own predicament, Lockwood’s narrator concludes that there is no way ...”

“... fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and ...”

“... He argued that China came to define itself as a modern nation-state partly as a means of self-affirmation, in reaction to Western incursions before the revolution. But it also seeks to recover a national identity that stretches as far back as the Tang or even Han dynasties. China may be more unitary than India, but the question of whether it takes a ...”

“... prophesied by angels; he spent fifteen months in his mother’s womb and in that time became a self-taught Christian. In 1987, when he was 32, he claimed to have received what he called a ‘divine anointing’. He described entering a three-day trance during which God instructed him to establish his church. He also hung out with the Apostles, Elijah and ...”

“... attracted me to The Daughter of Time when I was fifteen, I think it was probably this: Grant’s self-possession, his irony and savoir faire – and the hints of romantic sensibility under the bluff surface. He was so rugged, so masculine, so right. Predictably, all of that is less appealing now, and the inspector seems a more fragile and anxious ...”

“... 10 per cent of surviving literature in ancient Greek, much of it memoir, pop philosophy or self-help.This means we can’t be sure how dangerous the Antonine sickness really was, how many lives it claimed or whether it affected rural areas as well as cities. We don’t even know when it ended. Galen mentions further waves after the initial crisis, and ...”

“... don’t know. Why?’‘I don’t know either.’The characters in these novels are deeply self-absorbed, their anxious ruminations accounting for much of the irony and pathos. In All That Man Is (2016), Szalay drops the conventional novel for nine stories linked by theme. This allows him to introduce a wider cast of characters, not all of whom are ...”

“... contradicts its own Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: ‘All peoples shall have the right of self-determination.’Both the United States and the Soviet Union supported Nigeria’s federal government, but elsewhere around the world people sympathised with the underdog in one of the first armed conflicts to be widely televised. Don McCullin’s photograph ...”

“... or sadness.Fathers are depicted as pathetic and clueless, or untrustworthy and despairing, or self-mutilating and emasculated. Remy, the keyboardist in Memorial Device, is said to have come ‘from a long line of homos’; his ‘father had become a eunuch in a backstreet operation … after hooking up with a bunch of subterranean gays who practised cock ...”

“... democratic leaders, almost without exception, have degrees from elite institutions – including self-styled populist ‘outsiders’ such as Donald Trump (University of Pennsylvania), J.D. Vance (Yale), Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) and Marine Le Pen (Paris 2).The global populist​ wave has exposed the failure of meritocracy, whether democratic or ...”

“... himself was coy about its meaning. Towards the end of his life, in 1981, he referred to it as a ‘self-portrait’. ‘You only have to look at it, it’s me,’ he said. But the painting also seems intended to parody the Western fetishisation of colonised people’s bodies and cultures. In 1950, the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz described the buttocks ...”

“... of ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’, the fifth chapter of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), remain the best modern starting point for an understanding of Marlowe’s canon and its place in the world that produced it. Shrewdly detailed, sharing in the wit of Marlowe’s onstage cruelties even while it demonstrates the way they ...”