“... 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 ...”

“... that he would be willing to compromise on the issue of independence provided Beijing allowed Tibet self-governance: a one-country, two-systems arrangement, as in Hong Kong. Beijing will have none of it. One option for the Tibetans is to be patient, and hope that the CCP crumbles before they do. They might have time on their side: the Dalai Lama’s personal ...”

“... denied in the Soviet Union then, and still is in Europe today. If anything, the Russian self-image was even more high-cultural than that of the majority of Western European countries. The futile attempt to control or even to ban jazz and rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union is evidence of that. For the Americans, high culture, not just Modernism, was ...”

“... order to affirm the truculent, dignified singularity of things, which, like Paul’s ‘labile’ self or Robbe-Grillet’s ‘awkward residue’, by definition exceeds the machinations of ...”

“... guru derives from his Farewell Address, with its Kissinger-like cadences about the primacy of self-interest in international affairs; yet it was an act of almost sublime disinterest – Adams’s decision to send negotiators to France – that ranks as the most visionary act of foreign policy of the 1790s. Adams knew that he would divide the Federalist ...”