“... Traditional ways of seeing the world were, Bucklow tells us, ‘under assault from political self-interest and expediency on one side, and from scientific speculations and discovery on the other’. ‘Assault’ suggests that not all that was being gained was good. One of the pleasures of Bucklow’s book is his delight in turning things round: linear ...”

“... in the war-numbed Britain of the late 1940s.Still, I was glad to have bumped into his earlier self, up among the zombies. It made me feel less lonely as I ploughed my eccentric furrow, the purpose of which is sometimes unfathomable to me as well as to others. And, in an unexpected twist, it made me admire Frank even more, as I caught a glimpse of the ...”

“... Remember 1986? With a scratch of her pen, Margaret Thatcher ended the democratically elected self-government of English cities. She did it because some of the six ‘metropolitan authorities’, London especially, were daring to pursue their own un-Thatcherite policies. And she got away with it. In a constitutional republic, she would have been ...”

“... emergence, but Otter makes clear that by the end of the 19th century food power was dispersed and self-generating, ‘an instrument of discipline and economic transformation’ in its own right. For this reason he doesn’t pay much attention to political (much less party) battles over particular pieces of legislation or regulation: the system requires them ...”

“... republic could last for ever, but the more they strove to attain that, the quicker they invited ...”

“... Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela formed Opec – a global cartel of oil producing nations self-consciously modelled on the Texas Railroad Commission (even employing former TRC consultants on retainer). They began to experiment with production agreements and export quotas. When the United States set itself at odds with Arab nations in the 1973 Yom ...”

“... agreement made Northern Ireland into ‘a kind of mini EU, a polity that runs, not on unilateral self-assertion, but on painful compromise and awkward consensus’. This isn’t Foster’s style. Her election strategy was to present people with a choice: unionist dominance or republican dominance.The crocodiles bit back. After the election a grim-faced ...”

“... achievements of Ian Allan forty years later.Allan’s story illustrates two propositions that self-help gurus like to preach. One, adversity exists to be vanquished. Two, the simplest ideas work best. Allan was the son of the clerk at Christ’s Hospital, a school in West Sussex with its own railway station. But he himself was sent to St Paul’s in ...”

“... hats, Air Max and Converse – trainers again – and understands the special commonality and self-pity peculiar to Scousers like her. ‘Did you know that people from Glasgow and Liverpool have a natural affinity,’ she says at one point, high as a kookaburra and giving it the verbals as she walks down the road. ‘It’s the Irish in them. That’s why ...”

“... Covid-19 or not. I heard a proposal to give everyone a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine for self-testing at home. Others embraced instrument-free nucleic acid detection, which replaces the complicated boiling and cooling of a PCR machine with a single reaction at 65°C. Since beeswax melts at the same temperature, the idea was that everyone could be ...”

“... lay behind this pact. The Beidan – the Moorish word for ‘whites’, still widely used as a self-description by the nomadic peoples of the Western Sahel – saw only one difference between themselves and the French: religion.This arrangement held up until the era of independence, when the Beidan feared that the departing coloniser would leave them at ...”

“... the spectacular Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015); and Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (2018). She has worked on two major reorganisations of the V&A’s ‘permanent’ display. (In this world ‘permanent’, as Wilcox writes, ‘can mean anything from a decade to a lifetime, while temporary, in museum time, often goes on for ...”

“... in the military reputation of England across Europe, and with it an equally steep rise in English self-confidence, which lasted for centuries, reinforced by replays at Poitiers, Verneuil and Agincourt. It wasn’t much shaken by Jeanne d’Arc and has perhaps not entirely faded even now. To quote Shakespeare, ‘Come the three corners of the world in ...”

“... to her creations the sort of courteous interest one might take in a young cousin. Nothing about self-expression. Yet an absolute correspondence between her presence and her fiction. There is no pounce or scurry in these paragraphs but neither is there any hanging around. The attention is steady, whatever the disruption. Eeriness is delivered so easily that ...”

“... argues, exceptional among monarchs in her thoroughness, and gave short shrift to those whose self-discipline didn’t match her own. Her stubbornness could be a handicap – it took several deaths in her immediate family before she accepted the benefits of smallpox inoculation. She performed countless (often ostentatious) acts of public and private ...”