“... to deal with social problems; and their demands and ideas were also being highlighted in the newly self-confident press. The radically oppositional 19th-century ‘intelligentsia’ had not disappeared, but was gradually dissolving into a broader, more pragmatic and more diverse middle class. These are the developments which form the substance of Dowler’s ...”

“... in 301 he sent in his stepson Magas as military governor; in 275 Magas rebelled, and ruled as the self-appointed king of Cyrenaica from 275 to 250. We well may wonder how such a démarche affected Callimachus. A citizen of Cyrene with a government-sponsored job in Ptolemaic Egypt clearly had to watch his step, and not solely on account of intermittent ...”

“... movement, which encouraged Hindus and Muslims to come together to burn foreign goods and demand self-rule. ‘Their thirst for conquest is endless,’ Siraj says at one point of ‘the foreigner’. In 1908, the myth of the Black Hole was emphatically put in its place by a student of Akshaykumar Maitreya, who wrote: We do not believe that there ever ...”

“... that, as Powell said on his retirement in 1987, would have seemed ‘incredible’ to his younger self and remained ‘incomprehensible’. What he could not comprehend was the abnegation of national sovereignty. Alienated and alarmed, baffled and betrayed, Powell was ready to scheme tactically with the Labour Party, and sat in the Commons as an Ulster ...”

“... and any attunement to religion has been filtered out. The effect is to make him not just self-taught – as he was known to be – but self-made, and to turn him into an unconsoled scrutiniser of mortality, a sort of outsider artist. It’s true that one of his teatrini depicting the effects of syphilis is ...”

“... worldwide democratic revolution was ‘irresistible’, he ultimately thought democracy inherently self-destructive, and the pursuit of equality a form of false consciousness. As democracy progressed, true liberty would inevitably vanish along with the aristocrats who were its best defenders, and only ‘soft despotism’ would remain, in a society dominated ...”

“... this a precocious understanding of the value of the autographed work; or a piece of metaphorical self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an ...”

“... breathless, hypnotic novel of the Autonomist struggles of the 1970s (Autonomia was a self-organising – no unions or party affiliations – working-class resistance movement): ‘I get hit on the arm I feel a shooting pain I look round but there’s such confusion that I can’t tell who did it … the PCI militants turn up in droves more and ...”

“... in holy orders: ‘They were the last people you would expect to be converted to the cause of self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction ...”

“... unfamiliar in England, does not appear in the text, but the prejudice of the main character, a self-educated forewoman in a sweet factory, goes beyond ‘jingoistic sentiments … paraded in the music hall and the public house’, Glover writes. ‘Here is an anti-semitism that is ready to leave the street corner for the political platform, to make its ...”

“... written by submariners explain how US submarines ‘really’ won the war at sea. The American self-image is so much identified with technological mastery, it seems self-evident that superior weapons and equipment must have been the key to success then as now. The new US submarines introduced in 1941 were certainly well ...”

“... emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it possible for millions of people to share information in real-time. In Hayek’s view, that infrastructure was the price system of a free ...”

“... means absolute – tendency to increased brain size, more flexible behaviour, an enlarged sense of self, and autobiographical memory. Bigger brains require larger skulls, more easily balanced by being placed on the top of the body, favouring an upright posture with no need for a tail as a counterbalance. So the evolution of humanoid creatures could perhaps ...”

“... factors. One of Walser’s greatest stories, ‘Kleist in Thun’, is the lightly disguised self-portrait of a conflicted writer wrestling with his demons. ‘It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write,’ Walser says of Kleist. ‘He curses his craft.’ At some point, the act of ...”

“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”