“... opportunity of designing buildings for an entirely new form of society. Peter Ahrends’s self-published book A3: Threads and Connections is an oblique telling of this tale, through three generations of architects. Peter founded the influential firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal ...”

“... painted a small triptych called Study for Three Heads, with two images of Lacy on either side of a self-portrait. He also made a large-scale portrait.In one of his greatest paintings, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), he recorded the place he associated with Lacy. It is a landscape alive with brushwork that looks as though it has suffered radiation, or ...”

“... of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it mean for Habsburg self-consciousness, the question follows, that it made room at court for a lugubrious parody of one of its greatest heroes? And in what spirit was Velázquez enlisted to immortalise the parody? War and buffoonery went together easily in Madrid. The Dutch ...”

“... idols – everything short of cow dung itself – the young travellers all became rude, often self-indulgently scornful. They pushed beggars out of the way, like ancient feudal squires. All of them young and liberal, some politically radical, all compassionate under comfortable domestic circumstances, yet somehow the fierce heat and the sheer population ...”

“... teens, ‘to see the world’, and left in their early thirties and early forties as remarkably self-sufficient men who, despite this self-sufficiency, often found life on land savourless and disappointing. When moved to summarise what his years (1934-46) in the Royal Navy had done for him, Raymond Dutton (Mechanician ...”

“... that his ‘thisness tiptoes on Might-Not-Have-Been!’ and writes: ‘All my life/I felt my self’s lack of necessity.’ His best short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, is set in a movie theatre where the narrator watches on, helpless, as his father proposes to his mother on screen. ‘Don’t do it,’ the boy pleads. ‘It’s not too ...”

“... him affecting still: that frail physique, the greasy tail-coat and the style, histrionic but not self-choreographed; and, the concert over, going home in his old raincoat through the fogs of Fifties Manchester. 4 June. In one of the new monologues, Playing Sandwiches, I give the five or six-year-old Samantha studs in her ears, while at the same time thinking ...”

“... past puberty and so less submissive, more anarchic and all over the place, though there is one self-contained boy, who is neat, smart and prematurely sophisticated, a boy out of Saki. Finally the sixth form: half a dozen boys and one girl. Except not boys: one has a full-grown beard and though destined for Cambridge looks less like an undergraduate than a ...”

“... lost in the most heartbreaking manner – by coming within an inch of the finish line and then self-destructing’. He cites as evidence one of the most famous of all baseball images, the moment at the end of game six of the 1975 World Series, when ‘Carlton Fisk managed to overcome the laws of physics by body English’ – he swung his arms at the ball ...”

“... an Englishman, remained for some time a pressure group of notables seeking no more than colonial self-government. The first outbreak of more radical nationalist agitation, prompted by Hindu anger at Curzon’s division of the province of Bengal, came two decades later. To check it, the Liberal government elected in 1906 introduced a carefully calibrated ...”

“... study power close up. An interview was arranged. Van Middelaar has a highly developed sense of self-presentation, which he likes to dramatise. Introducing Politicide a decade later, he would write: ‘My book did not pass unnoticed. It was a surprise that an unknown 26-year-old should unexpectedly dare to challenge consecrated French thinkers. Without ...”

“... are investigated every year. But it appears also to be a vestige of 150 years of professional self-regulation, which came to an end as recently as the 1990s. There is still an assumption that difficulties should be dealt with quietly and privately by a trusted caste of physicians: after an incident, even an avoidable death, hospitals and doctors are ...”

“... William Dobson’s powerful portrait of Van Dyck’s friend Endymion Porter. Compare it with the self-portrait with Porter that Van Dyck painted ten years earlier and you see the thickening of age and weight of care descend on a man. Dobson died in poverty at the age of 36. Porter went into exile, returned destitute to London in 1649 and died in the same ...”

“... fieldwork (and deal with the breathing problem) by going to sleep and inhabiting a Na’vi second self, becoming an avatar of otherness, complete with long tail, striped skin, blue face, flat nose and an extra foot or two of height. Our hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), likes the role especially because in his human form he has lost the use of his legs, and ...”

“... another. In the new era Magdalen was headed by Herbert Warren, a man bursting with all the energy, self-belief and ambition of the imperialist Victorian. He was also a hearty and a snob, who did all he could to recruit aristocrats and muscular Christians. Among his prize captures were Prince Chichibu of Japan and later the Prince of Wales (known as ‘the ...”