“... to a specific catchment area. Choice is a predominantly middle-class preoccupation, and becomes self-fulfilling: parents see their children’s good grades not as a foregone conclusion – the result of better nutrition, access to extracurricular activities and greater cultural capital – but as the result of their striving to secure places at the best ...”

“... the larger-scale A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), reviewed in these pages by Will Self. Hatherley confesses to ‘nostalgia for the future’ in Militant Modernism, ‘a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted postwar attempt at building a new society, an attempt that lay in ruins by the time I was born’. It makes sense that he should ...”

“... Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a ...”

“... to me. If you’re under three and over ninety, okay. Anything in between, it indicates a loss of self-esteem. You’re in the way of the mopping, besides. Some supermarket spillage, soup or blood or butter, and before you can say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ a bell shrills: the cleaners are charging in with their yellow signs on legs, DANGER: MOPPING IN ...”

“... emerging which wanted to rescind the civil equality of the Jews, granted in 1871. Rathenau’s self-identification as a Jew is justification enough for the inclusion of this excellent brief biography by Shulamit Volkov, the leading Israeli historian of German Jewry and German anti-semitism, in Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series. Volkov has made good use of ...”

“... intimacy is part of the healing quality of IT for a soldier in a remote posting. It’s also the self-evident solution to his moral quandary. He explains to Lamo that he’s seen ‘awful things’ on ‘classified networks’, ‘incredible things … things that [belong] in the public domain … things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion ...”

“... principally – but she was also more circumspect than everything that was said about her lack of self-control suggests. An essay about marriage in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, entitled ‘A Woman and Her Master’, was most probably written by her, but prudently signed ‘A Woman’. And when she wanted to publish her views about religion, she accepted ...”

“... other. After their mother’s early death in 1799, they seem to have become inseparable and too self-sufficient perhaps to feel the need of husbands. The earliest of the rare occasions on which Losh’s own voice can be heard comes much later, in the extracts copied by Lonsdale from her travel journals. They record her impressions of Italy, where she went ...”

“... his son to plague he could have, but he chose instead to write about the death of his son in self-aggrandising terms, as having lost his ‘best piece of poetry’. I’m curious how Gilman would fit into his narrative the revelation in the updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Jonson, who was ‘likely to have fathered other ...”

“... of German colonialism. There was no equivalent in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 of the self-proclaimed mission of modernisation and civilisation enshrined in the educational, economic and religious policies adopted in the final phase of German colonial rule. It took the brutalising influence of the First World War – itself part of colonialism’s ...”

“... win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his characteristic half-belief in his own unrealistic fantasies: My hart was never broken till this day that I here the Queen goes away so farr off whom I have followed so many yeares with so great love and desire, in so many jurneys, and ...”

“... of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR sequence that traditionally went from politician’s ...”

“... art was, and where it began and ended. A painting’s separate firm standing in the world – its self-fulfilling tone-poem completeness – was for him an article of faith. Art was always art, for Nicholson, by virtue of its internal arrangement. His pictures are always fundamentally – in their formal logic – pictures within pictures. They unfold from a ...”

“... Kit Martin found a solution. He began dividing houses, starting with Gunton Park in Norfolk, into self-contained apartments that preserved the house and allowed the purchasers of two or three-bedroom maisonettes to luxuriate in extensive grounds. It became rather smart to give one’s address as The Laundry or The Old Kitchen. It is now the names of weekend ...”

“... that he was unaware of any particular quality that Rosebery had demonstrated save a talent for self-advertisement. Rosebery said that Balfour had done wonderfully well ‘for an amateur politician’. In 1911, Balfour cautioned the Palace against awarding the Order of Merit to Rosebery. Five years later, Rosebery bitterly opposed Balfour’s OM. It is ...”