“... of a search for alternatives and in the sense indicated by Romano, of sottogoverno, duplicity, self-interested manipulation and so on. The Italianate legend of Machiavellianism conflates the two things into one sinister image: ‘politics’ may accomplish miracles if sufficient virtu (cunning and will power) is put into it; or, if not a new world, then at ...”

“... King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in ...”

“... about the nature of the original aspiration. Hubris and duplicity are twisted in with clarity and self-sacrifice. We’re reminded that Stalin and Mao were the Algerian insurgents’ contemporaries. Lenin was a sacred text. Among his comrades, Fanon had admired above all Abane Ramdane, the architect of the insurgency’s first provisional government and ...”

“... of four famous politicians with a common vision of what needed doing, who had gathered a self-selected larger gang around them. One of the first ways in which the new members showed their gratitude to the man whose brainchild the Party had first been was to kick away the ladder by which he hoped to climb to power. First the convention, then the ...”

“... was under no illusion that the basic cause of the war was anything other than that of self-defence against Jesuitical Papists. Now it is true that, in retrospect, Baxter would say that the Civil War became a ‘War for Religion’ in 1643. But this does not mean (as Brian Manning seems to think) that he thought that it had been about ...”

“... his estimate about Cuban response to an invasion.Allowing for Schlesinger’s retrospective, self-serving grace-notes (one has to love the placing of the word ‘wryly’), a conversation something like this one must have taken place in March 1961, just a few weeks after the bombastic, menacing ‘Ask not …’ inaugural address, and very shortly before ...”

“... to vote did not include women or slaves. Among the American founding fathers who proclaimed the self-evident truth that all men are born equal were several slave-owners. In this country until the 20th century the unsuitability of women to vote, sit on juries or join the professions was regarded – at least by men – as too obvious for argument. We ...”

“... one hadn’t seen it before is to look at the world with new eyes, and that is an expansion of the self. It may or may not be an improvement, but not every improvement is the correction of an error. And not every improvement need bring us closer to the truth. Scarry discusses error only in connection with an individual’s change of mind. She doesn’t address ...”

“... The New Negro: ‘In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is – or promises to be – a race capital ... Without pretence to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.’What Locke ...”

“... anguish in, say, Mozart’s C minor and D minor piano concertos, or the quiet, although triumphal, self-satisfaction in The Creation (Haydn showing himself to be in direct contact with natural generation as opposed to the requirements of his patron): what if those works were also, internally, an expression of impatient ...”

“... to snare the elusive ‘non-specialist reader’. There is clearly something deliberate, even self-indulgent, about the digressive miscellaneousness of the enterprise, something again in which the publisher appears to have colluded with the author. Take the appearances of one John Morgan Richards. On page 65 we are introduced to him as an ...”

“... of interest in other people, or even in his own vision and imagination. She shows him devoid of self-knowledge and insight, of any political sense and of either a romantic or realist ideology. Muybridge may not have been a completely dedicated imaginative artist, but he wasn’t just a technical inventor aiming simply to conquer movement with the ...”

“... no personal information, not even a gender. This is, if not professional suicide, then a form of self-harm. On rare occasions invisibility can become part of an author’s mystique, whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days ...”

“... on the centre and right argue that Britain struggles to build infrastructure today because of self-imposed ‘barriers’, usually identified as the planning system and environmental rules. It is true that there are more constraints. But under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, engineers had to apply to ministers for permission to build ...”

“... had to lose, what was made to be lost. This very long view, in context, looks like an attempt at self-consolation, beautifully disguised as mourning. If all we had to do was mourn, the suggestion is, we could be calmly sorrowful; we could just mourn. And our shock and bitterness and blame would have vanished, like the objects of our love, into a kind of ...”