“... food expo at a sprawling complex built by the shah in the 1970s. Sanctions mean that Iran must be self-sufficient in food production and the sector is flourishing, despite 40 per cent inflation. Now the Russians are coming in search of gum, soap, tomato paste, laundry detergent. Dozens of halls were filled with stands for more than seven hundred Iranian ...”

“... family members and recycling much needed clothing; in Rondinelli’s view, their carelessness and self-interest worked to spread the plague through the city.No doubt the poor sometimes privileged their relationships with friends, children, siblings and neighbours over the ‘common good’. But the wealthy acted no differently. Pandolfo Sacchi, a renowned ...”

“... mortgages to collapsing schools and a real-wage death spiral. Its fiscal rules may prove a self-imposed prison. None of this is likely to prevent Labour winning, but there are few certainties about what it will do once it takes office.Starmer’s political statements rarely add up to much or endure for long: the ten moderately left-wing pledges made in ...”

“... across as quite strikingly unpleasant characters: ruthless, unstable, megalomaniac, dishonest, self-important, bombastic, arrogant, vindictive, scurrilous, vain and hyperbolic. Several of them were also mad. Others were content simply to drive their editors mad. Our first baron is James Gordon Bennett Sr (1785-1872), the man who raised the American press ...”

“... in all kinds of public circumstances, but then small children don’t make the distinction between self and other that prevents them from chatting to themselves in a room full of people and make-believing in full view of friends and strangers. I keep all that sort of thing strictly private – it’s the way of the adult – or try to, and although I do ...”

“... exacerbated by a global financial crisis; the external shocks of Covid and Ukraine; and the self-inflicted harms of austerity, Brexit and Liz Truss. The UK economy was growing, and then it wasn’t. The books were more or less balanced, and then they weren’t. We were OK, and now we aren’t.From an economic perspective, the solution to this ...”

“... of the West Highland white terrier: ‘Small, active, game, hardy, possessed of no small amount of self-esteem with a varminty appearance’. It makes constant reference to a dog’s imagined historical form, and to the importance of its being ‘fit for function’, even or especially if the demand for that function was obliterated by the industrial ...”

“... offering people a piece of their sentimental essence back to themselves, a glimpse of an idealised self. Just as Freud believed dreams were picture puzzles, today it seems that songs and famous faces are now active elements of our subconscious, holding us – sometimes a whole generation of us – in uncanny thrall.The programme for Abba Voyage could simply ...”

“... to the responses of others near you, joining an indistinct, wobbling mass.This anchorless, subtly self-adjusting character helps explain the mechanism (though not the driving force) of ‘grade inflation’. But that concept can be deceptive. It would be wrongheaded to claim that the same work is not more highly rewarded today than it would have been in the ...”

“... destruction and the excesses of consumerism that have seemed almost compulsory in recent self-reflective fiction. The art on the walls of the public areas of the ICU shows a Midwestern prairie in bloom, ‘though there wasn’t a prairie any more, not really. It was the most devastated ecosystem in the world.’ The narrator meditates on a bag of ...”

“... to realise that the gaunt extras on the film are from Maxglan, a detention camp. The chapters are self-contained, almost short stories in their own right, and aside from Wilzek’s (narrated in the first person) they’re written in free indirect speech, alternating Pabst (who has the largest share of the chapters) with Trude, his mother, Erika, his ...”

“... mid-20th-century heyday of criticism has long since evaporated, replaced by a conspicuous lack of self-assurance. I sometimes wonder whether academics in English literature have forsaken the primacy of the word for the world – rich in possibilities for impact, outreach and activism – that exists beyond the page. Collini is at pains to stress that his ...”

“... by a worker on the island. They contained 2116 reports of harassment, sexual abuse, assault, self-harm and suicide attempts, with more than half of the incidents involving children. A worker for Human Rights Watch who interviewed detainees reported: ‘A woman who misses her husband in Australia carves his name into her chest with a knife. A girl writes ...”

“... task of writing. Through their work, they are transformed. This might save them from oblivion or self-denial, but it also exposes them to the jealousy of other creatures.In her 1975 essay on écriture féminine, Hélène Cixous encouraged her female readers to ‘write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist ...”

“... viable electoral vehicle for the left and criticised Gott’s candidacy as ill-thought out and self-indulgent.As election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara Castle, spoke at a meeting on 18 January. The story ...”