“... economy. As soon as the medieval settlement was snuffed out by free-market capitalism, the ‘self-protection of society set in’, producing Victorian and Edwardian social legislation such as the Factory Acts. This conjuncture created room for a political and industrial working class to spring into being. Polanyi replaced Tawney’s pessimistic dichotomy ...”

“... lived for weeks on the Eucharist alone. Avoiding both conspicuous consumption and conspicuous self-denial, physicians recommended a golden mean. They understood the body in terms of balance. In a model dating back to Hippocrates, different proportions of four basic qualities (hot, cold, moist and dry) established four complexions or temperaments: sanguine ...”

“... the entire book. Much of the energy in d’Eramo’s story comes from the tension between her self-destructive impulses and her forceful will to live. But it’s intimately bound up with another impulse: ‘I was crushed by a sorrow and shame that paralysed my resolve. I had to shed my social class.’ (Her own earnestness on this score occasionally leads ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... du monde (1836), Uchronie (1857) and Éternité par les astres (1872). The title of the first is self-explanatory – the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after Waterloo. Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie has precisely the opposite politics. It is ‘set … in ancient Rome to emphasise that France’s recent illiberal path had ...”

“... to contribute to the wealth and stability of its neighbours. The scale of investment and level of self-interest seemed to suggest that the West was serious about the political and economic development of Afghanistan. In March, the United Nations Special Representative, Lakdhar Brahimi, outlined a plan for ‘a broad-based multi-ethnic government respectful of ...”

“... to the camp. I went to one of the leaders and spent three days with him. He spoke to me about self-martyrdom and faith and my duty. On the third day after morning prayer I went in a car back to Halabja again and went to the same house and I slept until lunchtime and then prayed and ate and then waited until after afternoon prayers and then put on my ...”

“... is representative of the confused tone of the whole, being at once contradictory, camp, Pooterish, self-pitying and vindictive. After reading its melodramatic final sentence – ‘To those who will argue that many things would have been better left unsaid, I can only comment that after a lifetime of enforced silence, there is no choice other than to tell the ...”

“... ambivalent about the past. The world before the war was her childhood, it remained sealed off, a self-contained idyll whose certainties gave her what all romantics need, a permanent sense of loss. For her the ancien régime never quite lost its glamour; she dearly loved a lord and her literary heroes were the Great Victorians. The power of the past, as ...”

“... works met Greenberg’s criteria for Modernist painting – as well as being flat, it should be self-contained, objective, immediate – but by means that Greenberg found utterly alien to such painting: the kitschy images and found things of mass culture. If anything, Lichtenstein forced together the poles of fine art and commercial design with more sparks ...”

“... as Kissinger put it, they hadn’t grasped ‘the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect’. With poor or no evaluation, much of the work of Soviet spies was wasted: when Philby told the NKVD during the Second World War that Britain had ceased to spy on its Soviet ally, Stalin simply assumed that Philby was a triple agent. The more ...”

“... Mugabe and his like fought for a ‘scientific socialism’ which turned out to be a cover for self-enrichment and authoritarianism. The one thing both sides had in common was their contempt for democracy. Ignorant armies clashed by night and Mhanda – bravely, naively – led one of those armies until his usefulness was over because he hadn’t ...”

“... them a new life.Shame’s unforgiving, Old Testament misogyny, which dictates Rena’s willing self-abasement, also rules out any credible male characterisation. That Taribo goes to great lengths to frame Rena’s shallow husband, in the process jeopardising everything he has worked for, is hardly in keeping with the portrait of a drug baron who thinks ...”

“... to the naturalism of Vermeer and Caravaggio and ultimately to the Arnolfini Marriage with its self-proclaimed evidential status (Johannes de eyck fuit hic, 1434), the claim that we are witnessing a record of transmitted light has always catered to this impulse. Whether we actually are witnessing a direct transcription and what kind of editing has occurred ...”