“... billboards and (by 1948) 137 million postage stamps. Since then it has proved useful not only to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the ...”

“... own observation of the Hopi, correlated to different phases in humanity’s search for meaning and self-knowledge, developing from religion (the least free), via the intermediate realm of art (where their truth remained ‘obscure’), to the summit of free inquiry, or science. Unfortunately, the diagrams Warburg produced to illustrate his theories are ...”

“... mastery of fluent, conventionally decorative prose that later gave him bullet-proof cultural self-confidence as he moved south into the Oxbridge world. For a short time at Keighley Grammar, he fell under the soggy influence of Moral Rearmament, the right-wing purity crusade. His schoolmates derided him, but Briggs always retained an undefined Protestant ...”

“... inner London land to build on. In Greenwich and, especially, Blackheath, the list of architects’ self-designed houses is long: Peter Moro, Brian Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with ...”

“... trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. ‘In these pages,’ the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will meet persons who ...”

“... values their multiple identities (faith, cultural and British). This will contribute to nurturing self-esteem and self-confidence, forming the basis for understanding and appreciation for the heritage and beliefs of others.’ Of course there will be clashes and conflicts, but when they come up you try to resolve them with ...”

“... and nobody must know of my plan: secrecy would be an insurance against failure. But the harder my self-imposed task proved to be, the nearer it might come to filling that blank. Don’t tell a soul. Just do it. Soon, then, every evening after work at the office, my formerly reluctant steps from the Underground station to the empty flat would be impelled by a ...”

“... cut deals with American oil companies to assure the latter’s independence of London, he died a self-declared socialist – who never hesitated to advocate unpopular causes in his own country – under secure Saudi protection. The figure of the British enthusiast for the cause of an oppressed people abroad goes back to Byron in Greece. Lawrence and ...”

“... like tents, and journeys beginning to the new camping grounds of sickness, disability, loss of self. In the next bay I hear a man – a son perhaps, himself elderly – talking to an older woman: their voices cultured, civil, tired, the voices of people who’ve had their time. ‘You’ll have to go to residential now,’ he says. ‘To that place we ...”

“... with some 15 million Britons enjoying a week away from home – if only at a Butlin’s camp or a self-catering hotel in Blackpool – in 1939. Some leisure activities still correlated with gender: men owned most of the more than one million private motor cars on the road by 1930 and placed most of the millions of daily bets (gambling accounted for 5 per cent ...”

“... than the false ornamentations, the stifling social dishonesties of the censored, conformist, self-deceived world of the last of the Kaisers und Königs. The results were certainly disconcerting. F.R. Leavis recounted in his memoir a number of examples of what one might take to be Wittgenstein’s rudeness and arrogance, yet Leavis was careful to say that ...”

“... anything criminal, and he wasn’t charged. Still, the local authorities don’t look kindly on self-styled clerics who turn up in the country, particularly when they meddle in local affairs, and Awlaki ended up in a dungeon in the political security prison in Sana’a. This prison spell was a gift from Allah, and bound Awlaki much more tightly to his ...”

“... Loi Taubira has at times been absurdly parochial, a combination of French obstinacy, pomposity and self-flagellation. In 2006, after the repeal of a law that had alluded to the ‘positive effects’ of colonisation, a group of deputies from Jacques Chirac’s ruling party unsuccessfully demanded the repeal of the Loi Taubira’s second article in the name of ...”

“... Literature, A History of English Prosody, The English Novel, A History of the French Novel and, self-referentially, books about books about books – A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, A History of English Criticism. In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was the supreme arbiter of literary ...”

“... of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere ...”