“... sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively pernicious.Two centuries later, the Kilbrandon Report of 1973 shied away from any sort of federal solution, on the grounds that it worked poorly elsewhere and defied ‘common sense’ – phrasing often deployed by ...”

“... in it), the video games he liked (Age of Empires and Call of Duty) and his hidden talents (piano, self-taught). We know that his idea of fun as an adolescent was to dress up as a police officer and harass the crowds at a shopping mall. We know that he once locked up his own mother in a palace and forced his diabetic cousin Prince Mohammed bin Nayef to ...”

“... Zhemchuzhina had not yet acquired the poise and elegance of her later years, but she was intent on self-improvement, studying first in a workers’ preparatory school and then at university for the first five years of her marriage. In 1927, she became chief party organiser of the Novaia zarya (New Dawn) perfume factory, and was promoted to factory director in ...”

“... A and B of the West Bank (40 per cent of the territory), where Palestinians have greater scope for self-government, cannot be connected to scale-efficient infrastructure networks for electricity and water. The areas are fragmented (ghettoised) into small enclaves surrounded by area C land, where infrastructure projects require Israeli permits, which are rarely ...”

“... about the enlightened sexual philosophy of Master Batista); the tall, gorgeous, wildly self-destructive painter Vladimír; the obstreperous poet Bondy; the woman in red high-heeled shoes and a dainty parasol (‘that Parisian pastry topped with the whipped cream’ – his wife); the small town on the river, the brewery, Prague, the smithy, the ...”

“... delays, and there have been reports of defendants getting to court late for hearings. Incidents of self-harm have increased by more than 4000 per cent since 2018 and guards routinely use violence to quell disorder. In one incident, captured by a body camera, a man collapsed after officers put him in a chokehold. ‘You’re not a very good actor,’ the deputy ...”

“... by the Prime Minister early on, but she cannot have been surprised when many dismissed this as self-serving hypocrisy. And it is not just the unemployed who believe that ministers are now ‘out of touch’, or who think that the closest Mrs Thatcher gets to the problems of public transport is when her Jaguar gets stuck in a traffic jam. Why should someone ...”

“... that had voted for it, and to pay the bills by unleashing a dynamic, innovation-driven, self-starting, post-EU economy. The problem was that he had no idea how to achieve any of this. ‘Levelling up’ meant everything and nothing. The strong medicine Cummings proposed to turbocharge innovation – including drastic reform of the civil service, and ...”

“... 1649 and 1689: in each case an unpopular monarch was militarily ousted and the space filled by a self-authorised parliament. But, unlike the court that in 1649 had sentenced James’s father to death for treason against his own people, the politicians of 1689 were nervous about regarding their acts as lawful simply because it was they who were now in ...”

“... Hefner wasn’t sure there would be a second. He is now 90, and still editor-in-chief. Prone to self-mythology, Hefner claimed he was Kinsey’s ‘pamphleteer, spreading the news of sexual liberation through a monthly magazine’. For all this supposed reforming zeal, it was only in the 1960s that Hefner began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a ...”

“... gradually uncoupling from nature, agriculture and the horse. But whatever one makes of its epochal self-consciousness, this is a vastly imaginative way of writing cultural history. Raulff is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or ...”

“... about political allegiance. Thomas does discuss politeness as ‘a form of social distinction and self-advertisement’, as well as the late 17th-century ‘ethic of urbane sociability’, which ‘stood for what was smooth and polished, conducive to social harmony and supportive of the established order’. But as presented here it’s a politeness with the ...”

“... in castigating Jewish critics of Israel’s xenophobic and far-right nationalistic policies as self-hating Jews. I believe​ I am more aware than most of the profound Jewish religious attachment to the Land of Israel. I was raised in a deeply Zionist and religiously observant home. Moreover, I am old enough to have experienced personally what it meant to ...”

“... and his promise to retain a socially conservative Supreme Court, allowed the thrice-married self-confessed ‘pussy-grabber’ to win the votes of 81 per cent of white evangelicals, a cohort that represents 26 per cent of the American electorate. As Barnett points out, both the economic and cultural accounts of Brexit risk patronising those who voted ...”

“... itinerary is abstract, notional. One doesn’t move from place to place. Each chapter is largely self-contained, agglomerative rather than narratively linked. There are no maps apart from an imperfectly positioned and minimally labelled atlas on the flyleaves. In some sense, although this makes it virtually impossible to follow the journeys unless one has ...”