“... was known popularly as Notre-Dame de Thermidor. The many names and their frequent changes, some self-determined but mostly reflecting the arrival and departure of men, give their own account of the mutability of these lives and their times.Récamier and Tallien were near contemporaries, born in the 1770s, as was Joséphine, at least for official ...”

“... but we also know about Dmitry’s doubts (‘Will I, won’t I?’) and we’ve seen his angst and self-censure. The officers who are soon questioning him, building up their case, have surely got the wrong man. In any case, when does the likeliest suspect ever turn out to be the person who did it?Dmitry’s trial, a face-off between the ambitious young ...”

“... but there were ‘fewer still where it ruled unchallenged’.Employers fantasised about a ‘self-acting’ mechanism, particularly when faced with the rise of trade unionism, but only specific parts of labour processes were amenable to mechanisation. A machine invented in 1824 was supposed to produce a complete pin, but four decades later the heads were ...”

“... are not among them. On the contrary, success in politics is a matter of rule-breaking and rampant self-interest, and power is exploited solely for personal enrichment. (A variant of this mentality manifests in online claims that Volodymyr Zelensky is a liar who wants more of British taxpayers’ money so he can build up his fleet of luxury cars.)Hilhorst was ...”

“... had been sufficiently ‘grabbed and bothered’ by his first sight of Parmigianino’s enigmatic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to feel that he ought to ‘do something’ about it. Sensing a kindred spirit, Davis squares up at once to her original brief. ‘Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because ...”

“... though this is a speculative suggestion – that builds in something, almost a capacity for self-reflection, which makes Anthropic’s models better engineers than those of their competitors.For all my concerns, I am curious to meet Mythos. The engineers who tested it say they were struck by how often it referred to the work of the cultural theorist ...”

“... a desperate attempt to appeal to them. The film director Tyler Perry gave a speech about being a self-made billionaire; Michelle Obama gave a speech about the person bleeding out in the delivery room being your wife. Kamala Harris promised to ‘protect crypto’. It didn’t work.Donald Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men ...”

“... were the same attitude retained, make it lose its balance. The figure, therefore, though still self-poised, trembles on the very verge of motion – a circumstance which doubtless enhances the indescribable charm of this statue which enchants the world.’ No doubt the rich vein of comedy which the authors have inadvertently tapped when they embarked on ...”

“... their subjects to believe that public policy is too complex or too boring a matter for ordinary self-respecting citizens to bother with: better to leave it in the benevolent, efficient hands of the technocrats. The avant-garde encourages this belief when it holds the mirror up to nature and reveals all the standard items in the avant-garde ...”

“... accord to the disasters of their waking lives. Coleridge, with what has to be called a magnificent self-importance, believed that the powers that had carried him through the darkness were also the reasons why he and his kind should be accorded a legislative position within the constitutional apparatus of the state. A number of distinct currents of feeling ...”

“... ostentatiously aspired – or in the control of the rising professional class with which Huxley self-consciously identified. Indeed, one of Desmond’s more tendentious moves is to suggest that Huxley was eventually won round to a sense of evolutionary progression precisely because it mirrored his own sense of social aspiration – as one of the community ...”

“... rather than eviction. If this tactic becomes more wholehearted, we get a full-fledged alternative self, as with Kipling’s soldier (‘I heard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as he ran/and I thought I knew the voice and it was me’). It is obvious, too, as both Davidson and Pears argue, that whatever is paradoxical about these concepts is intrinsic to ...”

“... the Leghisti of Umberto Bossi as the original sin of the Italian state – helped to undermine the self-sufficiency and initiative of some parts of the country, especially the South, where functioning arms of the old Bourbon government were allowed to atrophy. What the Leghisti ignore, and Mack Smith reminds us, is that the North profited from this new ...”

“... respectability arose within the working class as a spontaneous accompaniment of working-class self-assertion. This creates problems for the orthodox explanations of Victorian respectability which historians have not really confronted. Sometimes the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is acknowledged, but no more, with judicious quotation-marks, such as ...”

“... as a bumbling, mock heroic first-person narrator. The wanderer is a more grandiose but equally self-projective figure. In Rushdie’s first novel, the ungainly Grimus (1975), the themes were there but they had not yet found an adequate vehicle. The hero, Flapping Eagle (get it?), is an Axona Indian exiled from the language and the ways of his ancestors. He ...”