“... Roman tombs have given us the first named face in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The face belonged to Marcus Favonius Facilis, a centurion of the XXth Legion, and was carved, along with an inscription, on the elaborate statue that once sheltered his ashes. The statue was found in Colchester. De la Bédoyère’s book ...”

“... countries? The end of a truce last year between the two most powerful Salvadoran maras – self-repatriating gangs originating in the US – is responsible for some of this increase. The region as a whole is racked by violence and ruled by repressive regimes. Washington has sponsored one military coup after another. George Kennan sketched out the ...”

“... architecture or sign of city life. We are left with a truly nude figure, relaxed if slightly self-conscious, like a beautiful model posing, and yet the stabilising tree stump and base return us to the realm of sculpture. Neither a malevolent idol nor a dutiful civic emblem, this figure lives in the indeterminacy of drawing, both sculpture and living ...”

“... as a ‘celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit’. It’s the last of these conditions that Pluto and Eris don’t satisfy, so the IAU invented a ...”

“... upgrade, but he also claims that what he’s doing isn’t ‘about buying passports; it’s about self-actualising as a global citizen.’ Citizenship by investment is fairer than citizenship by birth, he contends, since it outwits fate (even if only for the rich). St Kitts is no longer alone in the citizenship industry, which according to ...”

“... or lives in England, the imbalance is even more absurd. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have self-government while England has only ‘the imperial Parliament’ of the UK. While the empire lasted, Englishness dozed quietly under the cloak of Great Britishness. Now the cloak is off, and Englishness wakes in a sour temper. England is well administered but ...”

“... circles of hell, which function to strip away a person’s humanity and undermine their sense of self. The erosion of people’s ability to see themselves as people was what led Ba Jin to characterise the Cultural Revolution as a ‘spiritual holocaust’. The Party leaders in Beijing understood the power of depriving people of their reputations and ...”

“... Even in her early diaries, Hartigan was guarded, and vulnerability was often only expressed as self-pity. She told her therapist, near the end of her life, that she didn’t feel guilty about abandoning her son. She wrote to her granddaughter that, as women, they had nothing in common. Yet the vehemence with which she denied the pull of blood is the ...”

“... calm vanity in interpreting all the deals. Some have seen the book as a grandiloquent and self-serving celebration of the way efficiency killed Hollywood, following decades in which the business had been lyrically unbusinesslike. But while there can be no doubt that Ovitz was a uniquely obsessed operative, if it hadn’t been him it would have been ...”

“... Most​ of the poems unearthed in the Beinecke are more approachable and self-consciously ‘poetic’ than anything in Discrete Series. Most hold their perspective from start to finish: in front of a fish tank for instance, in which ‘eel-like fish turn upward showing clowns/soft white faces’ (Poem XI). This could have been called ...”

“... by the Good Friday Agreement, which has complex provisions regarding cross-community consent, self-determination and a role for the Republic of Ireland and the EU, is far from Dicey’s model. In Northern Ireland a painstaking, written constitutional order was introduced as part of the peace settlement, bringing into existence a consociational, pluralist ...”

“... it. Among the most intriguing was Antigonus, nicknamed Gonatas, a member of the tiny cadre of self-appointed rulers we know today as the Hellenistic kings. His grandfather, Antigonus the One-Eyed, had been one of the Diadochi (‘successors’), the generals who served under Alexander the Great and fought to control his empire after his death in ...”

“... not only of the shifts in public tastes between fiction, science and poetry, but the mixture of self-sabotage and terrible luck that had him producing his best-remembered work at moments of personal and professional disaster. His first flush of suspense tales – ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – were ...”

“... on London by Brussels. It has always been one of the EU’s conditions. It is a demand rooted in self-interest: a large competitor economy on its doorstep represents a challenge. If the UK were given access to the EU market, it might succeed in undercutting EU firms. This is why Brussels is insisting on guarantees regarding UK regulatory standards; it’s ...”

“... social anthropology in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that I was joining a discipline committed to self-flagellation, most of which was undertaken in bad faith. In lecture after lecture it was explained that the subject was inherently racist and unscientific, and that its principal authors were all compromised in one way or another. Yet at the same time my ...”