“... 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 ...”

“... about Matilda’s mould-breaking political roles? Given the Norman propensity for rebellion and self-interest, it was a bold decision on William’s part to leave Matilda as regent of Normandy while he pursued his invasion of England; she seems to have held things together very competently. It’s perhaps significant that stress was laid on her own separate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it is suggested, could sing the way they did only as a result of intense personal suffering and self-destructive behaviour, preferably based on underlying ineradicable mental disturbance and race or gender oppression. What would be the point of a great woman singer who led a perfectly undramatic life: how could such a creature be? It’s true that Kiri Te ...”

“... will have cut that figure even further. In 1980, a vast number of white unskilled workers and the self-employed moved over to Reagan, a trend that has been consolidated since. The main shift in the other direction has been of professionals and managers and liberal Protestants (often the same people) to the Democrats. By the 1990s, the Democrats were getting ...”

“... and non-EU students because it cannot control the numbers coming from Eastern Europe. That is a self-defeating and foolish policy which Labour should leave alone. It has always exaggerated the significance of immigration as a political issue and, as with crime, it will never trump the Tories in any case. The only way immigration can really be regulated is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a pawn of the larger realms of England, France and Spain, until religious alignment, political self-interest and dynastic accident led to the union of the English and Scottish crowns in the person of James IV’s great-grandson and Henry VIII’s great-great-nephew, James VI and I, in 1603. Defeat has not helped shape the national psyche in England as it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”