“... that the existence of slavery undercut the moral legitimacy of the white South’s claim to self-determination. Fair enough, except that the same could be said of the Revolutionaries of 1776, most of whom were slaveholders. In the end, Farber’s discussion of secession reveals the enduring power of Lincoln’s idea that the US is not like other ...”

“... about welfare are likely to focus on the extent to which depending on others has to erode the self-respect of recipients and undermine the respect others have for them. Sennett thinks it quite possible for welfare agents, social workers and volunteers to treat their clients with respect, but doing so requires that they not blot out or occlude the ...”

“... full of irritating sub-Joycean rhymes and puns, seem the work of a writer struggling to fulfil his self-imposed schema. Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s third novel, has the most elaborate schema of all: six narratives embedded one within another, like a set of Russian dolls. The journal of an American notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s is interrupted ...”

“... 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee also ...”

“... addressed as if it were produced in a void, and each individual novel is treated as if it were self-sufficient, and bore little relation to anything beyond the reality, or fantasy, that it described. When critics look into Narayan’s work, it’s as if they see only themselves: the ‘timeless India’ they discover in his fiction is a mirror, or a ...”

“... was not going to be numbered among the great American writers of her generation. The gloomy and self-dramatising tone is characteristic. In fact she was exceptionally robust, and nothing could break her. She went on writing for years, and lived to see a flurry of interest in her work before she died in 1902. But she never earned the public recognition she ...”

“... Ascendancy, are exemplars. The Anglo-Irish were notoriously eccentric and swashbuckling, full of a self-vaunting swagger that the less admirable side of Yeats found appealing. The wild old wicked man, as he liked to see himself, would link arms with a bunch of crazed, colourful peasants in opposition to the merchant and the clerk. Social conventions were for ...”

“... has already been lost. In the US and the UK inequalities of market income (wages, income from self-employment, dividends etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first ...”

“... has a reputation for cockiness, but like a lot of cocky people his problem is not excessive self-belief but its opposite. His writing is often stagily masculine, like a sensitive adolescent who swears too much at not quite the right times in order to show how manly he is. He isn’t, as Byron said of Keats, always frigging his imagination, but he often ...”

“... practices and institutions which embodied both this ‘universal’ patriotism and a desire for self-improvement were forged from a sturdy amalgam of tradition, religious observance, deference, support of the military, pride, dislike of change and adherence to class and community. The brass band movement in particular conformed to Orwell’s view of ...”

“... Allen Tate, though, there were more pitfalls than plateaux. Tate was a quarrelsome type and deeply self-important; he had a taste for feuds, for laying down the law, for scolding friends who fell short of his elevated standards – both personal and literary. Many saw him as a somewhat comic figure, forever tinkering with the details of his Southern ancestry ...”

“... of empire, helping to define the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In ...”

“... few years, supermarkets had become the normal mode of food-selling in the United States, and ‘self-service’ became the shopping revolution of the century. A commentator on retail trends called M.M. Zimmerman set himself up as worldwide promoter of the big new idea but it was several decades before other countries, each initially in its own idiosyncratic ...”

“... it and breaking her trust. Near the end of the book, she describes the satisfaction she finds in self-denial, ‘a sick pleasure that felt like a hangover’. But it’s not all bad: ‘That restraint, that control at any cost, made me horrible at a lot of things, but it made me brilliant at my work.’Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the United ...”

“... science back. The full involvement of patients themselves, in the practical task of recovering the self that has been damaged or lost, is the largest of these missing parts. To complete the progress that the Russians started, Sacks calls for ‘a neurology of the self, of identity’, a task of neurological completion which ...”