“... taverns and coffee-houses, energetic, wide-ranging in their interests, and abundantly endowed with self-esteem. Pepys was the progressive administrator, Halley the precise astronomer, but sea-water ran through their veins with equal strength. The Navy and naval concerns substantially structured their careers. In the late 1680s, Pepys was probably one of the ...”

“... extra-terrestrial intelligences’ (Meti), on the other hand, requires the development of a self-interpreting language, as Galton, Marconi and Tesla realised. The second half of the 20th century saw several serious attempts at this undertaking. The zoologist Lancelot Hogben outlined his ‘Astraglossa’ at a meeting of the British Interplanetary ...”

“... has never given a transparent account of its finances or its members. It claims exemption as a self-styled ‘cultural organisation’ – or, on occasion, ‘charity’ – even though it isn’t at all clear whether it has ever registered itself as such.The RSS has also normalised Hindu nationalist violence. In 2014, around the time of the election, a ...”

“... you hardly saw the man who cleaned it. Man in a Red Turban, the panel that must be Van Eyck’s self-portrait, stayed in London (along with the Arnolfini Portrait). The man who wrote the motto on its frame, ‘Als Ich Can’ – or ‘Here’s what I [‘Eyck’] can do’ – springs to life briefly in the duchy’s account books two years after the ...”

“... interested in the way Megan’s mind worked. Their exchanges, in which CG gently probes at the self-serving illogic of Westboro theology while Megan observes herself growing steadily more susceptible to his flattering curiosity, take on the quality of a courtship in a very old-fashioned novel, where surface enmity fuels mutual attraction and careful ...”

“... prison.The circumstances surrounding Rwigyema’s death are less clear. A ‘slim, smooth-skinned, self-deprecating Hector’, he was admired by his men for his ‘almost suicidal courage’ and his kindness – he would argue for mercy when Kagame was out for blood. A friend who went with him to a football match in Kampala remembers the reception when he ...”

“... that the newly independent states were going to have to fight to be allowed to be economically self-sufficient. ‘Decolonisation,’ Nkrumah wrote,is a word much and unctuously used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political control from colonialist to African sovereignty. The motive spring of colonialism, however, still controls the ...”

“... Rego sat at the back of the class and painted from her imagination. ‘Of course one becomes very self-conscious at art school,’ she told her son hesitantly during an interview in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an intellectual, the restricted way of teaching in those days – the Euston Road method, which I could not do. You lose your – it’s not ...”

“... a large number of arrests. His message, that Putin and his clan are not sincere nationalists but self-interested thieves, is essentially a conservative one, which is the reason that it’s threatening.The US and European national security establishment has unsurprisingly sought to frame the scandal in a way that suits them. In Britain, the Royal United ...”

“... a race!’ In my mind’s eye, and possibly in Macaulay’s, is Tamara de Lempicka’s art deco self-portrait of 1925 showing her red-lipped and sultry-eyed at the wheel of a green Bugatti. Macaulay, however, has only an elderly Morris. She reflects that she is often stuck in traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a ...”

“... who hopes for a scenario in which tackling abuse is brought into alignment with institutional self-interest is placing too much faith in the market solution. As evidenced by the chimera of ‘corporate social responsibility’ – or, for that matter, by the current handling of sexual harassment complaints – the market incentivises the appearance of ...”

“... truly obscure rumination on the names given to horses, cattle, dogs and cats – as ‘triumphs of self-parody … far-fetched enough to make a psychoanalyst blush’. With​ the main theme announced, the book sets out to demonstrate the way concrete science operates in practice. Lévi-Strauss is interested in the logic of classification: where the Linnaean ...”

“... Guiana to visit a spider museum; and round again to Putin. On stage, she was less fierce and self-possessed than the figure I remembered at an FN open-air rally in Paris in 2012. She wasn’t helped by the party’s stage managers, whose son-et-lumière seemed to diminish their leader: the overused music – Ravel’s Bolero – the flashing lights, the ...”

“... want with their long-term partners is no less corrosive, no less demeaning to their sense of self, than ‘rape’ as we usually talk about it (correct or not, this is a very different, and serious, point). It is also true that she suggested, in response to a question from the audience, that two hundred hours of community service might be an appropriate ...”

“... in which Russians, Jews, Poles and others would enjoy the ‘autonomy to guarantee their own self-government in all matters of their national life’. It was a brief but genuine moment of harmony. Ukraine’s first prime minister, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a peasant-born writer with a revolutionary background, even had a Jewish wife. Then it all fell ...”