“... dark talk of strategic competition, but China and the US agreed a trade deal.As 2020 began, the self-confidence of the technocrats remained intact. The chief preoccupation in Europe wasn’t the immediate economic situation, but the possibility of striking a new Green Deal. Climate change and the energy transition were a huge, urgent challenge that would ...”

“... Elevating King to the pantheon of founding fathers, however, has served as a ritual of national self-congratulation that obliterates the radical movement in which King lived, breathed and died. For the parallel between the 1860s and the 1960s extends beyond victory to counter-revolution. The assassinations of Lincoln and King transformed these figures in ...”

“... of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation of the Jews began in the late 18th century. Between their expulsion from Palestine in the first century AD and the 19th century, the Jews lived within the wider society of gentiles, whose languages they adopted as their own and whose cuisine ...”

“... war, and, when his own kind of autobiography went into print, though its roots were in a richly self-pitying epoch, it was entirely free from that element. To what extent Brooke returned from the war to an accumulation of notes for books is not clear, but the fact that his eventual output included 15 works published – some separated by only a few months ...”

“... Scotland mattered to England. On both sides of the border, monarchs made claims about status and self-sufficiency, drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and ...”

“... but of doing so as an expression of Scotland’s authentic left-wing soul. It was assumed that a self-governing Scotland would lurch to the left, perhaps radically so.Over the first two decades of the Scottish Parliament, this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the ...”

“... movement in the 1970s).Buckley ran rhetorical circles around many of his opponents, exposing the self-satisfactions of the mainstream. But he also performed an inadvertent public service by inviting on his show a considerable number of Black radicals and figures from the American left. A favourite tactic was to skew conversations with ill-fitting historical ...”

“... critics and anthropologists, the orientalists continue to exhibit an almost complete lack of self-consciousness about the methodology of their field, its ‘knowability’ and the purposes to which their knowledge (which can only consist of interpretation) may be put. This he attributes to two factors: the marginality, or ‘willed irrelevance’, of ...”

“... at the Royal College of Music before the war – that Gurney was unteachable. For all his charming self-deprecations, Gurney was, before and during the war and after it, wilful, headstrong. And this, though it just may have been the precondition of his achieving what he did, seems to have prolonged his apprenticeship to the point where the strain of it broke a ...”

“... Mary Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, her poetry gets on with itself, not self-absorbed but quite independent. Men poets, it makes one feel, get together too much, have too much of an eye for each other’s points and failings; and women have not shared in this tradition, with its complex rituals of amour propre. One consequence is ...”

“... so on. Writing and reading became as confused and mixed up as sense and nonsense, male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous ...”

“... he writes, ‘employ no particular language at all: rather an odd mix of the bookish and the self-consciously demotic, a strange hybrid that lives nowhere off the page (nor frequently indeed even on the page)’. They ‘convert a lively and fast-flowing original into something much more plodding, formal and prolix, keeping Dante, as a venerable ...”

“... and all. It is not often that a man so eagerly reveals himself to be an officious, loquacious, self-important prig. I am not condemning him by the standards of our time rather than his own. His contemporaries thought ill of him too. Nowhere in his letter does he indicate the welfare of the ‘women’ or ‘girls’ to be of concern to him: he refers only ...”

“... his epigrammatic analyses of Kubrick’s character are clever and plausible, they have the air of self-contained fictions, unruffled by any complication or resistance in the object of study. ‘The recluse imagines that if he can reduce the possibility of surprises the world will become orderly, but the more order he contrives, the more it is vulnerable to ...”

“... leading to what is, at times, a rather functionalist picture of Athens as a lean, mean, self-cleaning machine. Undoubtedly it is important to see punishments as part of a symbolic system, but too much emphasis on symbolism can lead to misunderstanding – a digression on the symbolism of the figs which form part of the word sykophant (literally ...”