“... notions about the ‘spiritual’ dimensions of colours (red-orange was ‘martial, blatant, self-satisfied and harsh’ etc), and spent much of his life creating a system for ‘harmonising colour’ called Synchromism. Artists began to consider fusions of colour, light and sound, attempting to gain control over the entirety of a given ...”

“... Bentley adds a note to this line, a note so much in the Bentleian manner that it sounds like self-parody: ‘A strange Blunder to pass through all the Editions. Who ever heard of Bullion Dross? Bullion is the purified Ore, Dross is the Scum and Refuse of it. The Author gave it, Severing each kind, and scum’d FROM Bullion Dross.’ In editing Paradise ...”

“... beside the quays did not survive the onslaught of nation, race and sect. Diversity and simple self-interest were replaced by demagoguery, tribalism and nationalism and islands of diversity and mutual tolerance began to disappear. Philip Mansel documents the rise and inexorable crash of the great Levantine entrepôts as four centuries of relative stability ...”

“... decisive. The harbingers of ‘modern scholarship’ (as Blair Worden described them at the time) self-consciously identified themselves as ‘Revisionists’ and labelled extant interpretations as ‘Whig’ or ‘Marxist’. They then condemned these Whig and Marxist interpretations as ‘teleological’, because they were predicated on explaining outcomes ...”

“... probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian Fellowes, who strongly disputes a claim made by the film director Monte ...”

“... brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but backhandedly compared his writing to self-satirising chinoiserie. ‘Forgetting Elena is a masterful piece of work, I have no doubt of that,’ Friedman wrote. ‘The trouble lies in the contrivance.’ Though the language at times was ‘uncannily beautiful’, the narrator was ‘unfailingly ...”

“... Germans and Japanese didn’t follow this course, apart from the belief that security rested on self-sufficiency, was that it would have meant scaling down their allegedly idyllic agricultural sectors, which had become central to their national ideologies – ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ and all that. But it left America and the Commonwealth with the ...”

“... the strong nationalism of a middle-income country faced by imperial pressure from the outside and self-doubt on the inside, fuelled by a perceived decline in the world pecking order. The post-revolutionary dynamic, as the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, has meant that social pressure from below has continually forced a dispersed and fractious political ...”

“... reduce ideological belief to pathologies of sexual frustration, or the ordeal of constipation. A self-dissolving post-ideological irony is the dominant mode of the few narratives about Americans engaged in the struggle against ‘Islamofascism’ – where, that is, those narratives aren’t assertions, following Hemingway, Mailer and James Jones, of ...”

“... tell people that I died saving adorable kittens from a house fire, not that my brain exploded in self-defence rather than use ‘glower’ six times per chapter.More important, fan fiction offers an opportunity to remedy plot holes. Why did Dumbledore leave Harry in the Dursleys’ care although he knew Harry was being mistreated? Branwyn’s story ‘The ...”

“... certainly did not. It is a pity, then, that such a powerfully symbolic event should be treated so self-indulgently. One can appreciate the unimportance of being earnest while still hankering for a touch more ...”

“... Irish medieval thinkers, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, saw the cosmos as a self-delighting play of pure difference, in which subject and object, perceiver and perceived, were intimately allied. In some ways, his thought is a lot closer to Nietzsche and poststructuralism than it is to Leibniz or Locke. It certainly has more in common ...”

“... of Communist rule. Though he does trace the events that brought Mamata Banerjee (a ‘mistress of self-destruction’) to power, he is an unconvincing beat reporter. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. His narrative trips back and forth: from England, where he teaches, to Bombay, where he grew up; from the 1940s to 2011 and back again. The minutiae of his own ...”

“... the boundaries between rationality and superstition goes back to Horace Walpole’s sober and self-conscious preface to The Castle of Otranto, which suggests that the spooky manuscript was composed by a priest ‘to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’. Soviet Gothic writers took aim at superstitions that were distinctly ...”

“... to questions is no longer revolutionary. That’s why these demonstrations have no leaders and are self-disciplined. Everyone is equal.’ Where the Tunisian revolution goes from here is unclear. Three days of protests finally persuaded Mohamed Ghannouchi, who served for 12 years as prime minister under Ben-Ali, to resign on 27 February. Six other ministers ...”