“... books, Slotkin in A Great Disorder sees national myths as contested, evolving and sometimes self-contradictory. Thus the nationwide dissemination of the Lost Cause in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left space for the emergence of a more egalitarian vision. This, however, didn’t take hold until during and after the Second World War. Before ...”

“... America, and I decided to go back and rent a place in Kentucky. But I often felt uncomfortable and self-conscious. When I went into stores with a mask on I received angry stares, even though there were signs stating that masks should be worn. This struck me as worth writing about, but I didn’t. I just stopped wearing my mask. It was election year and Central ...”

“... a Jew, from a prominent New York Jewish family. People argued about whether his gift was an act of self-hatred or a wise guy’s last laugh. Judging from the reaction at the time, it didn’t occur to anyone that it was a matter of principle. And that included me. Sparks’s will, filed in New York County Surrogate’s Court, became a cause célèbre. The ...”

“... of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935. A chief ...”

“... The only foreshadowing of his political career seems to have been a propensity for theatrical self-fashioning. He’d learned from his mother that identity was, to some extent, elective – after all, she spoke with a ‘cut-glass English accent’ despite being entirely Californian. (She picked it up after watching Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.) After ...”

“... and 6 or 7 per cent of the workforce. Perhaps there are still Brexiters who think that being a self-serving annex outside the union – leaning in, like Switzerland, or a member of the EEA, like Norway – would see off EU migration. But even if their absolute intakes are lower, Switzerland and Norway have higher numbers of EU immigrants per head of ...”

“... media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive. The presidential party, United Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more specific programme than unconditional support for ...”

“... embarrassing transgressions. In Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele this ambivalence disappears. His self-portrait with Klimt of 1912 is the closest thing here to a great picture. The figures, both wearing smocks, stand close together – a blue smock belonging to Klimt can be seen in the exhibition. There is no island of safety isolating the fiercely drawn ...”

“... like the ‘dignified severity’ of Ozu’s films. He was probably thinking of their austere, self-denying style; but the contents of the films are severely limited too. The characters are not tiresome, though, because the internal spaces of their limited worlds are so vast, and so unforgettably delineated. Consider a famous scene from Early Summer ...”

“... then the fearful and subservient Arab minority that amounted to some 200,000 has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, and today the Arab population is 1.5 million. But the attitude towards it of the Jewish right has not changed for the better. On the contrary. In the bakery that is the Knesset (the Hebrew word for ...”

“... oozing arm ending in a vast crab claw, and become an outcast. Without ceasing to be the blinkered, self-admiring fellow he always was, he has decided he doesn’t want to be the mere material of his compatriots’ medical and military experiments. One of the finer touches in this (fortunately) none too serious plot is that the aliens have weapons of tremendous ...”

“... something else. In Cornwall he came across the work of Alfred Wallis, a local fisherman turned self-taught painter: on the way back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails through the ...”

“... I just submitted my opening paragraph for analysis. It gets low scores for ‘self-references’, ‘social words’ and ‘positive emotions’, and high scores for ‘negative emotions’, ‘overall cognitive words’, articles and ‘big words’. Which seems quite accurate, and perversely gratifying (though ‘big words’ aren’t ...”

“... a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’: doctor’s forms are sent but never received; a wife becomes self-employed and benefits are stopped for the duration of the investigation into her earnings; a patient is discharged from hospital, and because his benefits were stopped while he was ill, he now has nothing. Some people have to be coaxed in; they tell the ...”

“... get quite annoyed enough with, and Pike shows a considerable range of looks and tones, from perky, self-conscious, acting out her own imitation of Amazing Amy, to plain, battered and hopeless. Her methodical, erroneous belief that she can control the world is one of the more touching things in the film. Even more memorable though is Carrie Coon as Nick’s ...”