“... it – so that at some point its benefits are undone by the damage to human mental capacities and self-esteem. Capitalists insisted that the waste of a few generations in the living hell of the factories of Manchester was a necessary sacrifice to secure a better future for all. But where does the sacrifice end if capitalism’s imperative is the endless ...”

“... flight by heavier-than-air machines. He wanted Nadar’s help, impressed with his knack for self-promotion. Nadar needed no persuasion: he later wrote that he had been ‘brooding’ on the idea for years: ‘It seized me the way the Devil from Hell seized people in the Middle Ages.’ Along with Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt, a rich enthusiast who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... launched, intensifying after Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to Britain on a hare-brained, self-appointed peace mission. After learning that Hess had consulted an astrologer before his act of rebellion, Hitler approved an Action against Occult Doctrines and So-Called Occult Sciences, known as the Hess Action. Hundreds of individuals were arrested and ...”

“... by conspiracy theories, the scapegoating of minorities and fanfares of purportedly democratic self-congratulation. In Turkey Erdoğan has made cunning use of actual and threatened military coups against his regime to subvert democracy, in the name of democracy.* The seemingly quotidian category of democracy, so widely recognised that it seems to need no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the pale crescents splashed across their chests crack open. Your heart stops a little at a self-disclosure as effusive as a star shell bursting or a flag shaken out. The loveliness is so casual.Of course, they’re not performing for us. They don’t hold back, as they wrestle and swipe, or gnaw savagely at an exposed bit of neck or shoulder. Yet they ...”

“... and he left a project concerning the Occupied Territories unfinished at his death. A Polaroid self-portrait (1973) In the end Hamilton was animated by this tension above all: even as he embraced the postwar world of spectacle, he aimed to ‘open up an apparently seamless media image or event to analysis through a variety of print media and painting ...”

“... responds to the Italian’s hyperbolic authority. Turner​ insists that this streak of parody and self-parody stems from more than simple anxiety of influence or difference in artistic temperament. ‘Dante is a poet of truth,’ theological and political, she writes, who stakes his claim to greatness on that truth, whereas Chaucer, like Ovid, ‘suggests ...”

“... staff was that the conventional story of Nolde’s survival under National Socialism was a self-serving postwar myth. His paintings reflected not only his ‘emotional response to the world about him’, but a profoundly troubling nationalist and antisemitic politics. And the National Gallery in Berlin was planning a blockbuster exhibition to expose ...”

“... him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal experiences held no shame). Magdalena of the Cross jerks in satanic couplings with a devil called Balban, who is exorcised from her body and exits in the form of a caterpillar ...”

“... out of storage, which he hopes to raise by selling Alex’s last confession, a coked-up monologue self-recorded onto three videotapes.Despentes wrote Vernon Subutex almost in real time. The first book appeared in France on 7 January 2015 – the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings – and the third in 2017. The trilogy has been a huge commercial success and ...”

“... Once he had recognised this last feeling, he congratulated himself. But then, the sensation of self-approval was also confusing.‘It’s a bit difficult here when you have a passenger to see the traffic coming in from the right.’‘It’s impossible,’ said Chiara but drove on giving no quarter.He sat there, hunched and disconcerted, surreptitiously ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of presence, of embodiment and of referentiality, on the stand. In their numerous portraits and self-portraits in costume and with their character heads derived from now unnamed models (black and white), Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including his pupils Dou and Flinck, consciously and playfully explored the boundaries and fluid interplay between the ...”