“... preceding slope of the curve. Disruptive counter-cultures? Endemic civil wars? Reritualisation? Self-defeating pursuit of material consumption in a perpetual potlatch? There is no way in which we can possibly know what will happen, and still less can we even guess how it will be conceptualised when it does. This last point, indeed, is perhaps the one most ...”

“... not ‘Hunter’, if Dische is making a Mitford point, as she seems to be, about ‘class self-consciousness’ – a neat term invented by Benedikt’s Jewish colleague Dr Graf. Another stylistic oddity is that all flower names are in German. Perhaps they are meant to evoke the lyrical side of the German character, whereas the gruff absence of ...”

“... his day as his predecessors were. And what he has to say about contemporary Purbeckiana is oddly self-referring in its idiom. ‘Tyneham,’ he suggests, ‘became emblematic of the wider cultural syndrome, endemic in post-war Britain, that leaves its victims unable to grasp the modern world except through allegorical fables of malign encroachment.’ ‘I ...”

“... language in attacking corruption, luxury and ostentation. ‘Well before the Great Reform Act, the self-made man had already donned a new image,’ Kuchta asserts. Men became even more serious and their clothing even simpler, winning admiration from such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired this English ‘studied plainness’ as a manifestation of innate ...”

“... are known as neighbours’; the unbearably pompous and long-winded Lord Chancellor Brougham; the self-pitying Lord Althorp; and Lord Durham, who, Pearce guesses, had ‘read his Shelley’, though in 1832 pretty well no one, let alone a Whig earl, had read Shelley. Pearce has something nice to say about most of the Tories, too, notably the nauseating and ...”

“... led voters to overlook the kinds of insult to the citizens’ intelligence which the inexplicably self-defeating management of the terrorist attack brought back to mind: might they not have receded within a few days? As people grope to make sense of the reasons, local and international, political and emotional, which have landed them in a not altogether ...”

“... our Army and press used to call our ‘Security Zone’ (the foreign media called it ‘Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone’); and then, two years ago, out of that same Security Zone. The generals who were beaten then are running the current war. They have lived that defeat every day. And now they can teach them – that is, the Arabs – their ...”

“... have made reassuring gestures. George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have backed Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called for more UN peacekeepers to be deployed in ...”

“... election that would finally do for the Conservatives. It was a game Brown was sucked into by the self-confident tyros who surround him, but was played so elaborately and ham-fistedly that they were almost certain to lose. (Most people knew that nothing was more likely to unite the Tories than the prospect of an election.) In the first two or three months of ...”

“... Pei-Ming, a sadistic burst of fleshy pinks and reds from Yang Shaobin, and a sinister, denatured self-portrait (see left) by Yue Minjun, the most fashionable of them all. ‘It would be worth taking a few hits on that stuff,’ I heard a dealer mutter to his assistant, ‘just to break into the Chinese market.’ At Christie’s in St James’s for the ...”

“... else happens, and then spring arrives. ‘In a typical poem,’ Ruefle writes of her work in ‘Self-Criticism’ (2016), ‘a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him. Something terribly dramatic happens, and the poem ends.’ This is fairly accurate, except that ...”

“... the arrival of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the MRP split over his announcement of a referendum on self-determination in Algeria. The party’s long-standing leader, Georges Bidault, joined the paramilitary OAS, which launched armed resistance against de Gaulle in the name of Algérie française and narrowly failed to assassinate him, while his colleagues in ...”

“... multiplying range of personae. It’s curious that this man, so conspicuously lacking an authentic self, evidently regarded his single most authentic feature as a curse and a stigma. After Lillian Rose was born in April 2005, Rachel grew homesick and Neil, whose weakness for shopworn slogans is abundantly on display on his websites, embraced the idea of moving ...”

“... at the Edinburgh conference in 1974: for legal and financial independence, and for the right to a self-defined sexuality and an end to discrimination against lesbians. A seventh demand was passed at the final conference in Birmingham in 1978: for freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital ...”

“... et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage, and declare the balance of risk and ambition in the two self-evident. Comparisons of this sort have been the staple of art writing for a century. And of course the writers had a point. The style Cézanne can be seen building from 1873, out of the Pissarro materials, is in the end more turbulent and perplexing than ...”