“... in Wiltshire. Genealogy often gets short shrift from professional historians; it’s seen as self-indulgent and myopic, obsessed with the idea of origins. But as the branches proliferate, individuals become families; families become neighbourhoods and groups; groups become classes. The records are impossible to fathom unless you come up for air and take ...”

“... aspects of life in Oxyrhynchos . . . from the original documents’. But even such a seemingly self-explanatory enterprise has its difficulties. There was no mass literacy in the ancient world: at a rough guess, around a fifth of the adult male population could read or write to some degree. The well-educated enjoyed poets such as Homer, and even attempted ...”

“... of the adult. But it’s not very much about poverty; it’s more like the vindicating tale of a self-made man. Fleeing the Murdstones, the young David is briefly a penniless child, wandering the roads of Kent, but he is soon rescued by his benevolent aunt. David’s progress up the rungs of the economic ladder corresponds to Dickens’s own: like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are secondary: memoirs and published letters, as well as scholarly studies and biographies. The self-censorship that characterised the remarks of a leading communist such as Giorgio Amendola is never really examined, though there are hints that his ‘memory’ may have been ‘gilded’. Bosworth tends to take his memoirs, Una scelta di vita (1976) and ...”

“... grows little crystals in your eyes’ – tells RuPaul that she’ll combine a lip-sync with a ‘self-care tutorial’. Her drag, she explains, pits comedy against the difficulty of living with a chronic illness. The walk-through is often an emotional segment – before the lighter mood of the maxi challenge and runway show – and allows the queens to ...”

“... to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy ...”

“... a one-off.The adoption of SB 266 and similar bills has resulted, unsurprisingly, in increased self-censorship among professors. A 2021 law (HB 233) allows students to record lectures without the consent of the professor or other students, not only for learning purposes but also to be used as evidence in complaints against the university or for a criminal ...”

“... speech to the French diplomatic corps in August, Macron sneered at the ‘baroque alliance between self-proclaimed pan-Africans’ on the one hand, and Russian and Chinese ‘neo-imperialists’ on the other, both of whom, he claimed, were stirring up old arguments over sovereignty and colonial exploitation for their own ends. According to Macron, France is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... see something now moving beneath the everyday, the daily, the grey and oppressive stuff of the self, something more like an intricate geometry that lived beneath the surface of the material world. And this swift and gorgeous and too-rare strike to the heart was just like when one of the goldsmith’s apprentices beat and beat at a tiny lump of gold until ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Irish labourers. The policy reflected a moral belief that aid should promote self-reliance and distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. As Trevelyan explained, ‘Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.’By March 1847 public works schemes employed more than 700,000 people, whose wages supported ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the course of his life, he extensively documented his thousands of sexual encounters in a self-declared Stud File … He even tattooed a handy series of measurement marks on his forearm in order to accurately record the particular prowess of each of his partners for posterity … ‘I wanted freedom,’ he described later. ‘[Tattooing] was a grand ...”