“... horizon between myth and history’, the ‘passage from myth to history’, as if it were self-evident that this was a concept familiar to the Greeks and Romans, and the only question were where in time it should be placed. Feeney knows that ‘more and more scholars nowadays are inclined to deny that there is much value in the language of “mythical ...”

“... aspects of life in Oxyrhynchos . . . from the original documents’. But even such a seemingly self-explanatory enterprise has its difficulties. There was no mass literacy in the ancient world: at a rough guess, around a fifth of the adult male population could read or write to some degree. The well-educated enjoyed poets such as Homer, and even attempted ...”

“... there be cause to wonder whether Poe’s drinking, a form of temporary and finally irrevocable self-obliteration, had something to do with a disturbed sexuality – the result of a complex of experiences with women that began with his mother’s death? Eliza Poe had married first at 15; when she died, she was a 24-year-old mother of three, deserted during ...”

“... Third Republic propaganda urged people to get to know France, and the cause of national self-promotion was supported by local historians, new institutions such as the Club Alpin Français, and by children’s books such as Augustine Bruno’s Le Tour de France par deux enfants. For their part, the provincials were supposed to express patriotism by ...”

“... The streets are laden with lovely feasts, and the singing of boys rises like a flame. The poem is self-reflexive: a chorus of young men sing about how, in times of peace, choruses sing in praise of the gods. Bacchylides thus suggests that the performance of his poem is itself a sign of peace. One common criticism of Bacchylides is that he is too ...”

“... agitation by a handful of Islamists or Communists, meant that they were likely to be blindsided by self-consciously political protest. Again and again they were caught off-guard in gauging the depth of the resentment felt by their Arab subjects or the scale of the protests they were capable of mounting. Having mastered an enormous mass of disconnected archival ...”

“... who rejected her. These and other inventions brought in to serve ‘a narrative of racial self-help and uplift’ are patiently and politely demolished by Hutchinson. One example of his way of unstitching arguments knitted to fit an ideological pattern concerns Nella’s period in the early 1920s as a librarian at an uptown branch of the New York ...”

“... arrives: Margaret Thatcher, apparently a regular visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She totters through the park, steadied by an agency nurse, wearing ‘old ladies’ clothes’ and ...”

“... together with ‘a great book against Christianity’; but they never came to anything. The same self-knowledge may have lain behind the frustration of many of her other bold plans: to found ‘an association of literary men and artists’ to study the Ottoman lands; to find hidden cities and buried treasure; to make ‘sublime and philosophical ...”

“... as being ‘much taller than any building I ever crashed into in Paris’. He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony ...”

“... Kath smokes defiantly while she breastfeeds, and they read (in a nicely understated twist of self-reference) short stories by Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence. Sonje has lost her job at the library because she’s suspected of ‘Communism’. There is an honourable tradition in English language fiction – in women’s fiction particularly – of ...”

“... had two consequences: it made support for the government almost a patriotic duty, and Thatcher’s self-estimation and confidence were enormously increased. Although Campbell argues that in the long term the war represented an almost insane misdirection of priorities, Thatcher emerges from his account rather well. However much her government was responsible ...”

“... political promises. His TV stations offer the model of a ‘normal’ family, acquisitive and self-interested, ‘surrounded by a multiplicity of commodities . . . tolerantly Catholic, vaguely inclined towards gender equality but with mothers still playing a central role as providers of services’. Ginsborg links public exposure to Berlusconi’s ...”

“... potential of land and its vegetation for its own use.’ While any society is and was capable of self-defeating deforestation, European expansion changed the rules: local or regional economies became increasingly connected, with clear consequences for forests as the European (and later North American) demand grew for the resources of the newly discovered ...”

“... principles and pressures they couldn’t resist. Two principles came with Woodrow Wilson: national self-determination, in its unqualified form the source of much difficulty then and plenty since; and ‘open diplomacy’, a contradiction in terms credible only to the inexperienced but music to the ears of the demagogic. The most damaging pressure came from the ...”