“... anticipate the rise of political parties: indeed, they were anxious to avoid them as divisive and self-interested. The constitution originally provided that voters would choose presidential electors from among their most well-informed neighbours of independent judgment, and that each elector would cast two votes for president, with the second-place finisher ...”

“... horror, psychological realism and fantasy, the stories are written in a smug tone that recalls a self-professed neurotic on a first date cheerfully outlining his adolescent traumas and the ensuing ‘issues’. (A couple of the stories are centred on such a guy, to grating effect.) The lack of mystery isn’t terrible, just deflating, and a little ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in humility, for it would be unbearable if they did.’ Instead, he jests, they should stand up in self-defence like the Wife of Bath, ‘fierce as a tiger in India’. But Chaucer was not writing a conduct book, any more than the author of Le Ménagier de Paris aimed to provoke a sophisticated courtly debate. Rather, Le Ménagier interprets Griselda’s tale ...”

“... interpretation made by long-retired officials (not by constitutional judges), Japan’s self-defence forces relied fully on American support in the event of combat, but were forbidden to provide any support whatever to US forces. As I noted to some of Abe’s officials at the time, had this fact been known to the American public it would have ...”

“... communities established their own militias, to protect themselves and enforce their demands for self-rule. The communist insurgency is long over, but more than two dozen ‘ethnic armed organisations’ still exist (the largest fielding more than twenty thousand troops with armour and heavy artillery), plus hundreds of smaller groups. No one knows how many ...”

“... Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic barrister with political ambitions. Their daughter Rachel (almost immediately known ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet Keats. Charles Lamb was there. Hazlitt, who had attacked Wordsworth in print, was not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is compatible with modern scholarly understandings of Cyrus’ actions, which point to rational self-interest – not least his desire to put friendly allies on the road to Egypt (eventually conquered by his son Cambyses). Isaiah himself says that Cyrus doesn’t acknowledge or even know the god of Israel. But the fact that Cyrus isn’t a believer makes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there is another explanation for economic statism in today’s China. It has to do with the self-propelling dynamic of capital accumulation. The most recent data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics put the number of state-controlled enterprises at 362,000 in 2022 (up from 227,000 in 2013). A recent study cited in Jin’s work, led by an ...”

“... affect’. This is quite different from the contemporary novel, which Jameson sees as marked by ‘self-indulgent streams of consciousness’ and ‘fragments of an alleged objectivity’, debased inheritors of the story and affect of the tense days of real realism. The subtitle of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a book put to very good use by Jameson, is ‘The ...”