“... market with its state-backing; its talk of public service is feel-good hokum disguising economic self-interest and managerial lassitude. Norman Tebbit derided the ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s.’ These complaints are not pursued ...”

“... spent, because it incentivised renters to become homeowners and rendered them more responsible and self-reliant (and more likely to vote Tory). It also had another effect. To his final question, ‘Why was there so little popular and political resistance to this huge transfer of national assets?’, Christophers has several answers. First, the process was too ...”

“... for his popularity. A number of prominent liberal intellectuals – in a move that suggested self-flagellation but was closer to racial blindness – claimed that if Trump was popular, it was because of liberal condescension to the fabled white working class. The identity politics of the left, they suggested, was driving misunderstood and maligned ...”

“... that the octopus is, phenomenologically speaking, in a hybrid situation: its arms are partly self, and partly other. Because of this, the octopus is sometimes held up as a mascot for the ‘embodied cognition’ movement in psychology, according to which the physical body, by constraining and making possible certain actions, is itself ...”

“... their system was mine too. My 13 years had taught me that to appease emotion was to encourage self-doubt, and that with sufficient will and application almost any obstacle could be overcome. I was more committed to these principles than my mother, who tried to stick to them only to come into open rebellion in the final years of her life. While the system ...”

“... Confederate states under military rule, stipulating that they would not be allowed to become self-governing and rejoin the Union until they permitted black men to participate in politics on the same basis as white men. The pariah states acceded, with remarkable results. ‘You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the ...”

“... is the child’s public house … [It] serves as an excellent training in those habits of heedless self-indulgence which are the root of half the misery of the slums.’The essays in this new volume have different views on Booth and his survey. Morgan and Anne Power, both of the LSE, salute him as the founding father of social science, the progenitor of ...”

“... unrelenting aggression has driven weaker team-mates out of the game entirely, undermined their self-belief to the extent that their simplest skills, ingrained since childhood, deserted them. (Something of the kind happened to me.) He has ruined opposing clubs, defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers, for instance, so often and in such heart-breaking fashion that ...”

“... Abacha’s predecessor, as Executive Director of the Directorate of Mass Mobilisation for Self-Reliance, Social Justice and Economic Recovery. MAMSER, as it was known, was supposed to awaken ‘the consciousness of all categories of Nigerians to their rights and obligations as citizens’ and ‘to fight against internal and external domination of our ...”

“... Camilla’s first husband. Sophie was clearly put out that something so suitable for her own foxy self should be thought appropriate for Granny Frump, and went unprofessionally silent for a while. It used to be that the British public looked on these occasions with a subject’s sense of inclusion, seeing very clearly their own role and their own station in ...”

“... they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles. No Western head of state in recent memory (British monarchs included) has had a more regal touch than François Mitterrand, alleged socialist. Nothing is more ...”

“... hands of the champions of repeal, by making them sound principled, and their opponents whiny and self-interested (this is what Norquist was playing on in his Holocaust rant). Similarly, it didn’t help trying to explain that ‘double taxation’ was nothing to get excited about, since it was so commonplace (the same individuals can be taxed on ...”

“... account of his brush with death, I feel shaken again: as if my fairly innocent adolescent self is sitting on some huge prehistoric monster stranded on the rocks with a pale blue sky behind it. But that’s not quite right; the wrecked ship isn’t just something used and past: it’s like looking at the disasters, mistakes and accidents that are all ...”

“... a cross-fertilisation from which escape is impossible: the global village, in other words – not self-conscious cosmopolitans playing at being villagers, or scheming to become shamans of the largest imaginable community. This is why Attali’s ‘world spirit’ is bound to manifest itself as esprit de paroisse, as well as in resonant proclamations of the ...”

“... imitations of Versailles all across western and eastern Europe. But it was most vivid and most self-conscious in post-revolutionary France: Paris, capital of the 19th century. In Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Paris was the centre of fashion, of luxury industries, whose Universal Exhibitions were places of pilgrimage for all Europe: the marketplace of ...”