“... The rousing cadences and biblical imagery: Douglass is more than a little Christ-like. He’s all self-assurance and intellectual grandeur, though he is ‘not beyond laughing at himself’; and while his priority is ‘to help crush slavery through peaceful moral persuasion’, McCann shows that his sympathies are wide-ranging. Although he witnessed the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... start with, a melancholy inseparable from Walsh’s late sense of how far he had come from his old self as a writer. Reading his 1964 remarks or his 1977 letter, it’s hard to hang on to the thought that this was once an unpolitical man, who could write of his feelings in June 1956, after Perón had been ousted and gone into exile, that he was not interested ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thesis, based on many other examples, that Carthage was essential to Rome’s own development and self-image. According to legend, both great powers were founded in the same year, 753 BC. By insisting that Carthage inculcated its children with eternal hatred of Rome and made them vow to destroy it, Romans justified their own compulsion to crush Carthage as ...”

“... of confidence aggravated existing disagreements between traditionalists in the leadership and the self-styled modernisers who took their line from the Italian Communist Party. The eventual split was less dramatic than the break with the Provos had been: the violence was strictly rhetorical. The Democratic Left took with it most of the political capital the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to go to. He had spent 29 years of his life in China, was apparently intelligent, cultivated and self-sufficient, and aside from his impatience with one aspect of official policy seemed very much a product of the high tide of late Victorian and Edwardian imperialism. I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the ...”

“... only undertaken to tap the potential of the daily but to set out in search of the McGuffin of the self. In La Disparition, that missing e isn’t just a piece of literary gymnastics; sounded as eux, it becomes ‘them’, the disappeared, among them Perec’s parents, his father dead from a gunshot wound while serving in the French army, his mother put on a ...”

“... age of 32. All this might hint at hyper-intensity or emotional desperation. Yet the lifestyles and self-representations of Suckling and his friends have to be viewed warily. We are not yet in the world of Rochester, who would have Puritan rule to react against and a merry monarch to indulge him. There were common sense and realism in Suckling, who mocked the ...”