“... us that Rosalind Krauss sees Man Ray’s objects, such as the eggbeater labelled Man (a partial self-portrait as well as a joke), as resisting the logic of exchange of which so much has been and so readily made. My favourite manifestation of this refusal is Picabia’s signature as a drawing, shown in these pages, which Baker calls an extraordinary ...”

“... organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state ...”

“... what to do with mendacity at this scale. Its smaller instances are just exercises in political self-flattery: choosing misleading GDP statistics, or making tendentious claims about the tax burden, or claiming British credit for falling global energy prices. Behind them is a more pervasive lie about whether it is possible to run an advanced ...”

“... Belle Époque (though not so named until four decades later), France in 1900 was an anxious and self-critical place. At the start of the 19th century, it had been the most populated of the Great European powers; now, it was the sparsest. The demographer Jacques Bertillon noted of France’s rivals that ‘they are all growing, all becoming more ...”

“... sincere and – strangely for such an experienced politician who clearly doesn’t lack ego or self-confidence – diffident. His air of ordinary-bloke humility contrasted with his large and, for adherents of the post-Thatcher consensus, unsettling ideas. Unsettling not so much in respect of the future as of the past – he now doubts, he says, fundamental ...”

“... life. In the 1870s, Syed Ahmed Khan, pleading for compromise, warned Muslims that their self-imposed isolation would have terrible economic consequences. In the hope of encouraging them to abandon the religious schools where they were taught to learn the Koran by rote in a language they couldn’t understand, he established the Muslim Anglo-Oriental ...”

“... Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in self-imposed exile for 11 years. His revision of Elements was printed in Paris in 1642, and in 1647 the new version was published in extended and revised form as De Cive. It was the final defeat and execution of the king in 1649 that provoked Hobbes to compose ...”

“... more wedded to what-works politics than the Conservatives were under Thatcher, who was openly and self-consciously ideological. Much of the present malaise in British politics flows from this. Among other things, what-works gives the wrong answers. The classic example is the 42-day detention legislation. The only rational explanation for the government’s ...”

“... leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is ...”

“... and political engagement. As Zubok acknowledges, their Soviet schooling propagated ‘ideals of self-cultivation and self-improvement, and the pervasive cult of high culture … once intrinsic to the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia’; as a result, it produced young people ‘with intellectual curiosity, artistic ...”

“... Deutscher and by Trotsky himself, which Service sees as over-sympathetic on Deutscher’s part and self-serving on Trotsky’s, but he keeps this out of the text (and doesn’t use the footnotes to quarrel with other historians). Some reviewers have seen Service as hostile to his subject, but I see it not so much as hostility as a satisfaction in being ...”

“... Zuckerberg later sued each other, while Zuckerberg prospered, becoming the world’s youngest ‘self-made’ billionaire by 2008. That’s Mezrich’s plot. Soon it will be the plot of a film, The Social Network, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing. But most of Mezrich’s book is not plot, nor an explanation of how and why social ...”

“... and crowns, appears in the next chapter, in which England is cast (by Deasy) as a land of monetary self-sufficiency (though threatened by usurious Jewish merchants), while Ireland is recast (by Stephen) as a pawnshop, one to which he’s more in hock than most. The chapter ends as the sun profligately flings, through a chequerwork of leaves, dancing coins onto ...”

“... phenomena, Cartledge argues, rendered less congenial both Thucydides’ ‘severe, and somewhat self-deluding claim … to tell objectively and accurately only the actual facts of the past’, and his decision to limit those facts to ‘significant political, diplomatic and military events and processes’. But the recent expansion beyond Thucydidean ...”

“... he himself had devised. The form the NHS took was inspired, according to Bevan’s account, by the self-organised, free-at-the-point-of-use health service set up by workers in Tredegar, the small mining town in the Sirhowy Valley where he was born and raised, and where he began his political career. Although he had the backing of the prime minister, Clement ...”