“... the romance, and gives Cleopatra due credit for brains and for a good politician’s sense of self-interest. It is a pleasure to find a history written by a non-specialist for a non-specialist audience that contains so little to criticise. It may not be quite as scintillating as Tom Holland’s Rubicon, still the best popular history of the late ...”

“... novelist Mary Keene told him she was pregnant with their child, he wrote her a characteristically self-serving letter in which a steely abnegation of responsibility came wrapped in the flannel of warm concern. He said that he hoped that once the baby ceased to be too preoccupying they would meet again, adding: ‘Being yours I shall love it and I only hope it ...”

“... Max Wall, Vera Lynn, Ken Dodd and Bruce Forsyth. Shirley Bassey’s ‘suggestive lyrics and sassy self-confidence’, Major believes, are a direct legacy of Marie Lloyd and Bessie Bellwood. Music hall may have started out raucous, but it gradually became more refined. The early theatres presented young women dressed only in flesh-coloured body stockings and ...”

“... a philosophical and political universe filled with warring factions, where nuance, ambiguity and self-doubt are both boring and irrelevant. One final example of his selective reading is his discussion of the doyen of 17th-century heresy-hunters, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. We are led to believe that Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be self-generating: Razorfish, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo! There was a strange connection during that boom between whimsy and greed, as if the internet had brought about a completely innocent, even goofy way of becoming fantastically rich. A popular trade magazine for ...”

“... does not know’) shows that Proust is really getting into his melancholy swing, and that even self-pity can become a game. The last piece in the series describes a person who is able to get over much loving and suffering because he can forget them, as he forgets everything. ‘Time like the sea takes everything away.’ There is a reason for this ...”

“... the 20th century, appeared in Italy in the years before the First World War. Fascism, the original self-identified totalitarian political ideology, no less brashly expressive of modern times, emerged in Italy in the years immediately following the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last ...”

“... are fictional or personal, it says they are an echo of a non-echo, the voice of a ghostly second self, someone who keeps not taking the road not taken. Is this what a poem is? What would it mean to think so?Romantic Shades and Shadows situates itself very clearly in the current academic landscape of literary studies. The long reign of the so-called close ...”

“... the negation of the complete heteronomy of the isolated person through the collective self-realisation of the sick as a revolutionary class’. That may not be how most of those involved would put it today, but there is a sense in which Western electorates seem to be trying to form themselves into giant patients’ collectives, through which to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... survey from 2008, in which 80 per cent of the 94 residents asked favoured demolition. A subsequent self-conducted poll of 140 tenants found that 90 per cent favoured refurbishment. The council asserted that restoration was economically infeasible, and that with only 252 flats, the site was too valuable to justify such low population density. Refurbishment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... revelled in, the subject of artist and model. On this occasion, however, he denied himself such self-reflexive subjects, presumably realising they could not meet the demands imposed by the commission. How else to explain the absence of traces of the studio composition in the final design? The central pyramid of light has gone. Lacking, too, are the ...”

“... it descends into brutal civil war.In this context, radical political movements are shown to be self-deluding. They appear during stable eras but are made irrelevant, or are transformed past recognition, by real crisis. Cixin wants us to know that communism, especially, sucks. In the first scene of The Three-Body Problem, a 15-year-old girl is murdered in a ...”