“... in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of Birthday play, the hero of which shared her ...”

“... photocopied typescripts of the Sigma project, launched in 1964 by novelist, junkie and self-described ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, the late Alexander Trocchi. Sigma was meant to revolutionise the planet: to bring together cultural dissidents from all over the West, until their various schemes and finally their single voice, seductive and ...”

“... as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William Morrison’s dirigible boasted a four-horsepower ...”

“... the New Yorker-ish knack – of making style a matter of poise and clarity and simplicity and self-concealment. He learnt what he could from the great fashion illustrators, the society cartoonists, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, but he got most of what is fresh in his drawings from a New-York-in-the-Fifties world of homosexual felicity, a literary ...”

“... the first eight decades, when it did so openly, but also afterwards, less openly and perhaps less self-consciously. Since 1947, the Indian state, hungry for big power status, has adhered more aggressively to the Euro-American, global, apparently perennial model of statecraft. Nehru’s part in this was crucial. He belonged to that section of the freedom ...”

“... just one drink’. This is something deeper than romantic longing; it’s tangled up with Ames’s self-conception: Reese ‘had taught him to be a woman … or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d moulded him to her tastes.’ Although he has detransitioned, he still ...”

“... more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners.After the 2013 coup, the Egyptian military, under the self-proclaimed president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, started demolishing the tunnels that led to Egypt, effectively joining Israel’s blockade. Tunnelling was therefore redirected towards the border zone with Israel. In 2014, two separate groups of Palestinian ...”

“... sort of thing, intoning against ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. But Clough saw that self-dialogue could be a cure as well as a disease, or at least a way of being less dutiful towards your discontentments. Throughout the poems you can sense the secret glee of the pious schoolboy who once confessed in his diary: ‘Feel almost inclined to sin ...”

“... are closer to the attitude of the artist-photographer Claude Cahun, who staged a series of self-portraits in all kinds of personae, and wrote a little book of Heroines, in which Helen of Troy begins her tale: ‘I know I am very ugly, but I try to forget it. I play at being this beautiful young girl.’ When Angela Carter reworked the myth of Helen of ...”

“... matter. Woman is Animal. Yet, as Warner points out, Woman functions in the myths as the animal self more effectively where there is a belief in the value of the ‘civilised’. When ‘nature’ is seen as aggression, and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman ...”

“... they wanted out of life, and how they should behave towards other people, in order to generate self-respect as well as respect from others. That respect included approval from the priestly caste of a religion which had started out a thousand years before by saying a great deal about love and forgiveness, and which early on had experienced some difficulty ...”

“... Its main city is Qamishli, which feels a long way from the war. This is a fertile and largely self-sufficient region of wheat fields and oil wells, though few are still operating. Further west is the canton that surrounds the devastated town of Kobani, which Islamic State failed to capture despite a four-and-a-half-month siege that ended in January when ...”

“... hegemony go hand in hand with something much more mundane: a tendency among their leaders to seek self-enrichment. Authoritarianism goes hand in hand with kleptocracy (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). The straightforward explanation is that the absence of legal and political constraints makes ...”

“... his life thereafter. Browne goes so far as to compare his Kentish country house, Down, to a ‘self-contained, self-regulating scientific ship methodically ploughing onwards through the waves outside . . . almost as if he were on the Beagle again, sailing into some unknown port, where people felt it was a natural ...”

“... of commerce in the world’, and the British Empire had always been – at least in its self-representation – concerned overwhelmingly with trade. Hence Charles II’s abortive attempt to transform Tangier, in Pepys’s words, into the ‘most considerable place the King of England hath in the world’. Tangier is also crucial to Colley’s ...”