“... the GPs who saved a local hospital in Hillingdon from closure; the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses seeking to enforce the taxation of casual print-workers; and a considerable number of private individuals concerned with the legality of official action or inaction. The power of the courts to intervene where an arguable misuse ...”

“... were latently present before he even saw the Latin textbooks at the local grammar school. The gods self-evidently favoured the Midlands, and hence, as Garrick put it in another song at his 1769 jubilee, Our Shakespeare compared to is no man, No Frenchman, nor Grecian, nor Roman; Their swans are all geese to the Avon’s sweet swan, And the man of all men was ...”

“... a year I wore a raincoat more indoors than out. Savage prefaces his introduction with Curtis’s self-directive: ‘Need to ignore + tear up previous influences (unimportant) – look ahead. Taste is habit. The repetition of something already accepted.’ When he bought new records, old ones were removed from his collection. He had a blue room with blue ...”

“... hasn’t been settled 144 years after the Commune itself was crushed. Some see it as the first self-consciously socialist uprising: a popular rebellion, unlike the liberal and nationalist Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Others describe it as one among many manifestations of French republicanism. The Yale historian John Merriman’s new book concentrates on ...”

“... of febrile sensibility, was born of the desire for immersion in the elemental, the dissolution of self in the infinite, which made weather as great a theme as love for the Romantics. But by then the weather had been thoroughly theorised. The poets came to it after the painters, who themselves came after the theoretical exponents of the Picturesque, the ...”

“... the quid pro quo for continued financial aid from Israel and the West and the trappings of self-government. As a consequence the PA is limited to using the prospect of ICC membership to gain leverage in what most Palestinians believe to be fruitless negotiations, rather than as a genuine means of achieving redress. In July Hanan Ashrawi, a senior ...”

“... labour’ than one given over to immaterial knowledge? Obrist champions the ‘creative self’, which is the very term used by Luc Boltanski in his analysis of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, and the Obristian motto ‘Don’t Stop’ perfectly suits the work regime that Jonathan Crary called, in a recent polemic, ‘24/7’.3 Second, the shift ...”

“... the son of a Jewish carpenter, who similarly preached a message of good morals and faced down the self-appointed wise men of his society. This Jesus was called the Christ, an ambiguous word in the pronunciation of the time: scholars might interpret it as ‘the anointed’, but many took it to mean ‘the good man’. His gospel went round in the form of a ...”

“... for the party of Enlightenment, parsing it as ‘an enlightened assault on the pretensions of self-appointed representatives of enlightenment whose doctrines promised to overthrow what they hoped to realise’. The appearance of Bourke’s unsurpassable Empire and Revolution coincides with the publication of the long delayed fourth volume in Oxford’s ...”

“... Britain as a crushed, impoverished ex-colony’. In one of several moments of pained self-revelation, Stewart confesses a strong identification with Gildas, ‘for his deep pessimism about Britain and his painful investment in its fate, his consciousness of his own failings in a world unmoored’. The kingdom of Rheged proved short-lived. By ...”

“... make sense of this transnational governmental network through the inherited language of collective self-government. The question is not whether the sovereign people sleeps but whether contemporary governmental practice can still be explained through the conceptual language of sovereignty. The question is not whether sovereignty is lost when Parliament hands ...”

“... defiant statements (Byrd used his to proclaim his allegiance to the pope). McCarthy attributes his self-assurance in both the highest and the lowest musical styles of the day to the difficult trajectory of his career. ‘He did not merely survive constant change: it made him even more capable.’The scant biographical detail means that it is difficult to ...”

“... notaries, now to be found in the city archives: pairs of dice; a bare bottom; a note-to-self: ‘All that a man has is hanging by a fine thread, and the most secure things can collapse quite suddenly.’ Merchants surrounded themselves with fine things. Silks could be draped and handled, jewels hung round the neck. And yet this wealth was secured by ...”

“... should have been the high point of her career.’ We don’t begrudge her these moments of self-pity, but McGregor makes less effort to help us understand the couple’s son, Frank. The only time he visits Doc in hospital, he struts around ‘doing something on his phone’ and then abruptly leaves for ‘a work thing’. He has an ...”

“... or limits about the difference between right or wrong’. As for the young man: was this self-destruction, or did the system destroy him? Either way, this is the habitat that produces the great minds behind the some of the world’s most sophisticated modern spying weapons. Now imagine how these cyber-geniuses feel when they leave the military and ...”