“... about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the Guardian. Swaggering through his high-street stores, journalist in tow, he showed off his knowledge of the stock, his attention to product display, his grace while accepting customers’ compliments, and his perspicacity in ...”

“... the city – it had become ‘apparent that the men’s lives were in danger’ in the previously self-policed community, which Toews calls the Molotschna Colony. The original plan had been to lock the rapists in sheds ‘for several decades’, but one of the women, Salome Friesen, a ‘formidable iconoclast’ with ‘vesuvian’ rage, attacked one of them ...”

“... needless to say, no respectable woman was allowed backstage, where only the entitled male – a self-declared ‘connoisseur’ of women, whether as lecher, or in rare cases, as painter – might tread. These baroque rules explain some painted facts: Degas had the freedom to place his focus anywhere in the theatre, the viewer’s nose and eye one moment ...”

“... He wanted to write books that would be too angry for most readers, too chilly, exhausting and self-conscious. To do otherwise would produce fiction ‘simply inadequate to the social and technological crises’ he saw developing all around him. Which was a shame, because he also thought that mass readership of his work would lead to ‘better political ...”

“... 1990s, this indisputable record revealed that all previous insider accounts were both wrong and self-serving. Far from being the voice of reason, Bobby Kennedy had been belligerent to an almost hysterical degree, urging not only attacks on the offending missile sites but a full-scale invasion of Cuba – even though, as his own diaries show, he knew that ...”

“... that the absence of this concept from the language indicates a deficiency in the awareness of self. Chinese also lacks a word for ‘solitude’ as distinct from ‘loneliness’, as if there were no positive aspect to being separate from the group. At that festival in Berlin, Danlin felt mortified by the quality of the Chinese hors d’oeuvres being ...”

“... play with toys, and can differentiate between different human keepers; magpies demonstrate self-awareness when presented with a mirror (a long-established test for the woolly quality known as ‘consciousness’), while ravens make political alliances among themselves; wasps and sheep are both adept at recognising individual faces among members of ...”

“... the press started to call young groups ‘haircut bands’.Not the least important of these self-conscious funsters was a band from Beckenham called Haircut 100, who specialised in perky, blond-highlighted pop. Many of their fans had the ‘wedge’, a hairdo invented by Trevor Sorbie, which was quite poser-ish and layered in at the back, popular with ...”

“... betray contradictions and show the workings of power; they are both the gaze and the true, secret self. When Pecola goes to the store in town to buy some Mary Jane candies, Mr Yacobowski, who is white, looks at her with reluctance. ‘Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate and hover … He does not see ...”

“... me, to enrol me,’ she thinks. ‘Right up to only sleeping with people he OKs.’ Veronica is self-centred and sometimes foolish, but Condé shows her navigating machismo on all sides: there’s something more going on here than just wilfulness or naivety.Published in 1976, Heremakhonon wasn’t a success. The left attacked it for betraying African ...”

“... to God and to fate. Sredoje is disappointed by what he reads. ‘Fräulein, whom he had known as self-assured to the point of obduracy, was suddenly revealed to be fragile to the point of helplessness in the face of life.’ Tišma focuses on the link between libido and violence and the ways in which it played out during the struggle for survival of the ...”

“... as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and ...”

“... O’Connell moulded the institutional Catholic Church in Ireland to become a more independent and self-assured body, while at the same time he became increasingly reliant upon Catholic clerical support to mobilise the Catholic electorate in his favour and away from the patriarchal control of their Protestant landlords. These strategies derived from ...”

“... longer in his right mind’, but ‘visited by voices that come ... from deep within the self’. Automatism, he suggested, should be investigated, and offered for consideration a poem of his own written automatically in a state of trance. (Not surprisingly, it differed very little from others written presumably in a condition of full ...”

“... requires responsibility, which requires sanity, which is an achievement not a gift. Rational self-rule, individual or social, causes mental fatigue; it’s less effort to be dictated to. What Collingwood does not say, so I will say it for him, is that people do not really like the truth; they feel coerced by reason, bullied by fact. In a certain ...”