“... core strength lies, as it has always done, among the small manufacturers, shopkeepers and self-employed in what were once fortresses of the DC: the Catholic provinces of the North-East, now increasingly secularised, where hatred of taxes and of interference by the central state runs especially strong. Here resentment of fiscal transfers to the ...”

“... vehicles, not only those of the police and fire services, but military trucks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. As the road descended towards the coast, their jaunty mood began to evaporate. Suddenly, before they understood where they were, they had entered the tsunami zone. There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who have worked with Palantir, its suppliers and its software. Behind the company’s bombastic self-image, we found there was often a much more prosaic reality: problems with software, pressure from management, staff resistance, but also an unrivalled level of political access.Palantir began in 2003, in a small office above a sushi restaurant in Palo ...”

“... 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 ...”