“... to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for photographs. His success as a mounted officer in the US army in France during the First World War was his only experience of the wider world and became a ...”

“... by EC Comics’ crime and horror output. Publishers responded with a Hays Code-style programme of self-censorship. EC closed all its titles except Mad magazine, and American comics became a little blander, until, in his own telling, Stan Lee came along and shook things up.Lee – the writer-editor who supervised the renaissance at Marvel Comics in the early ...”

“... fuel extraction have shifted tactics. Climate denialism in the 1990s was an overt and clearly self-interested lie, a conspiracy against science; the emphasis today is on broad-based movements that aggressively defend the fossil fuel way of life. Even with considerable funding from business, the big lie became hard to uphold; Exxon and BP now acknowledge ...”

“... to take the family’s religion seriously, since it has already been shown to be destructive and self-defeating.In theory Jas’s two grannies represent different intensities of commitment – there’s a more religious and a less religious side to the family – but no such nuance is detectable in the text, unless it’s the presence of a coil stuck in ...”

“... The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention is now ending, and the executive is pushing hard at its boundaries. What’s needed is not yet a constitution, but its preliminary, the ...”

“... inside sanatoriums varied and Iris left school to care for her mother. Being a daughter was about self-sacrifice (Iris tried to jump into Beatrice’s grave when she was buried near Rose in Bristol), a belief Iris tried to impress on her daughter Hazel, who was born in Devon in 1948. But Carby was unruly. She resisted assimilation into the maternal family ...”

“... federation drew on East London’s long-standing radical and sexually egalitarian networks and was self-consciously progressive. In sharp contrast to the WSPU, the ELFS permitted male members, supported local trade union campaigns, and – when militant tactics like window-breaking landed Pankhurst and others in jail – built up a ‘People’s Army’ to ...”

“... of the civil rights movement, as well as to fundamentalist Christians and inheritors of the self-reliant Jefferson-Jackson tradition. His rhetoric warned of the evils of big government: he rallied businesses and banks against regulation, family-minded moralists against permissive laws, and the vestiges of the America First lobby against expensive ...”

“... seem traditional if Clark weren’t such an active protagonist in his own argument. In part this self-staging comes with a phenomenological perspective (Clark counts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s great essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ as one inspiration), and it is accentuated by psychoanalysis as well. This isn’t new to Clark – his social art history often ...”

“... prestige of France. When they finally met, de Estrada unwittingly snubbed Napoleon’s progressive self-image by explaining that Mexico needed ‘a dictatorship on the pattern established in France’. But this didn’t prevent the two men from plotting regime change. French forces were to accompany a British naval operation aimed at punishing Juárez for ...”

“... echoed around him throughout his life. But despite all that, Pope still looks like the most self-consciously canonical of 18th-century English poets, even though the canon has been exploded outwards, and even though the number of people who really love reading him is now, I would guess, less than a thousandth of what it was in 1720.He achieved this ...”

“... mature women of vaguely Eastern European origin who used sex to drain men of money, status and self-esteem before discarding them – and then to the more youthful flappers, with their casual disregard for social and moral convention. In 1926 MGM cast the unequivocally European Garbo in two vamp films, Torrent and The Temptress. In both, she sinks her ...”

“... novels, among them a belief in the primacy of the conduct of the individual and the quest for self-knowledge over any group allegiance, a belief in elitism and a suspicion of democracy and equality. In The Mask of Apollo (1966), Axiothea, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to attend Plato’s academy, says: ‘Equality! I hope I need never sink so ...”

“... to let the documents speak. Whereas sociologists tested hypotheses, refined concepts and offered a self-consciously theoretical analysis, historians remained wedded to the instance, accumulating endless examples and finding exceptions to every rule. Knowledge of the sources was the profession’s substitute for thought. For the more outspoken radicals, and the ...”

“... by Jones’s clamorous appeals – Freud is more than willing to remind Jones of his abject self. Jones was certainly preoccupied, in more ways than one, by what to call his potent self: ‘Jones’ seemed singularly unpromising. Given, as Jones writes in one of these letters, that ‘psychoanalysis is ...”