“... and Betty Cook were prominent in this movement, and credit the strike with developing their self-confidence and strengthening their political beliefs. Both have continued to fight for social justice and to stand on picket lines ever since. The women’s movement, and the alternative welfare state it created, played a pivotal role in enabling the miners ...”

“... metaphor – from Arthur Miller’s skewering of McCarthyism in The Crucible to Trump’s self-righteous tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What strange classification can bracket such diversity, from nursery tales ...”

“... of human shit. The book’s most extraordinary feature though is Carrington’s unsettling lack of self-pity. She describes how her parents sent her nanny to see her: ‘Tirelessly, Nanny repeated, “What have they done to you … what have they done to you,” and wept by my bed … I was exasperated by it, for I felt at that moment that my parents were ...”

“... on Kashmir in 2010. Not everyone appreciates her outspokenness – she’s been called a rampant self-publicist, among other things – but her politics and her activism are all unapologetically on show in the pages of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Like The God of Small Things, the novel is concerned with family, class and caste, but it’s also ...”

“... Britain’s future outside the EU. Other than​ his boozing sprees, little about Banks fits his self-description as a man of the people. A rich man with rich friends, he goes to the places rich people go. Nothing in his book suggests he has any strong prejudice against immigrants or an ingrained political hostility towards immigration: his wife, Ekaterina ...”

“... line for making doors and a Quranic school. Unlike many militias, Radaa is not driven chiefly by self-enrichment: Kara’s Salafism – a non-jihadist variety – is relatively apolitical, pious and conservative, and Radaa is respected since it represents a semblance of order. A commander at the base said they would disband if a real state emerged, but ...”

“... untinged with shame’, and hoped that matching funds would ‘wipe out a slur on our national self-esteem’. Given his fantasy that ‘the Jew stands on the verge of world domination,’ Chesterton could never have stayed in his job after ‘Archie was outmanoeuvred,’ as Beauman puts it, and control passed to the American Shakespeare Memorial ...”

“... palace. All those are helpful. But they come second to two basic forms of knowledge. The first is self-knowledge: what the hell do you think you are doing? Are you clear about your aim, are you just getting rid of the current rulers, or installing a regime you have designed to be your obedient servant for years to come (in which case invasion might be simpler ...”

“... wage’ met the needs of women and children, how deeply it undermined women’s independence and self-respect, how it compromised women’s capacity to earn, and how it was far from ‘natural’ but rather a human institution of relatively recent vintage. So I can’t help but feel indignant on Rathbone’s behalf when reading a work that painstakingly ...”

“... Drake, an actress and writer so interested in psychology that she helped Grant towards levels of self-examination that included LSD therapy. Then he betrayed her, terribly, with Sophia Loren, whom he thought he wanted to marry. Dyan Cannon was marriage number four, and Barbara Harris, a hotel publicist in London, was the fifth. But we are left in no doubt ...”

“... an external reality. To take one pressing example, Cantwell Smith argues that safely controlling a self-driving car in an urban environment will require the kind of judgment that makes such awareness necessary. Perhaps, but it seems at least possible that careful engineering could make a car that would be safe enough, even if it doesn’t really know what it ...”

“... north and emptying into the sea near Alexandria.Egypt’s dependence on the Nile is central to its self-definition, but there’s something about that number, 95 per cent, that startles people when they are obliged to consider it. Everyone would ask: did I understand that a country with a population of 100 million, growing at 1.8 million a year, relied almost ...”

“... experiencing a proper ‘bourgeois revolution’ (along the lines of 1789) or developing a fully self-conscious or revolutionary proletariat. Britain’s empire engendered an inflated sense of political and economic grandeur, but two world wars and subsequent decolonisation left an exhausted nation without any tradition of innovation or democracy to draw ...”

“... silver thread.’ We must not forget either that Jacob is himself a merchant, though a lazy and self-indulgent specimen: ‘Jacob never sits in the office, but rather at a little table having tea, dressed lavishly, like a Turk, in a blue-green Turkish caftan and a dark-red Turkish cap. Before they get down to business, they always have to have two or three ...”

“... connections between one episode and the next. Thrown among other people, he is revealed to be a self-satisfied fraudster, ‘a perfect little saint, insufferable, always merry, always friendly, always polite’, much like ‘those serial killers who … to everyone’s surprise, turn out to be good husbands, good fathers, good friends – it was a question ...”