“... to a show of Agnes’s that uses her own blood as a medium. He’s alarmed by the undertone of self-harm, but wouldn’t an engineer father have a question about the how as well as the why? How, as a matter of technique, has Agnes fixed the blood in her indictment of the relentless petty cruelty of life so that it stays bright red on the walls? The ...”

“... same cannot be said about the book accompanying the film, which is aggressively sumptuous and self-satisfied: large, beautiful and as inappropriate as a 5.4-pound souvenir added to an infantryman’s pack.)* We are in the sky, as the jungle is painted with napalm; in Washington DC, studying maps with optimistic generals; at home waiting, when American day ...”

“... as mixed as the methods: the connections range from the inspired to the whimsical. An instance of self-aware pseudomorphism is a gallery curated by the American painter Amy Sillman; titled ‘The Shape of Shape’, it is a mélange of 71 works, some old, some new, by 71 artists, some familiar, some not, that feature mostly abstract forms suggestive of body ...”

“... the World!’Ghost hunting was a money-spinner between the wars, especially for the popular press. Self-styled investigators, often journalists, went on assignments to haunted houses, toting microphones and cameras, and other paraphernalia. Like other sensational stunts paid for by the papers, the stories were aimed largely at the rapidly expanding readership ...”

“... it’s not easy to write well about rich Jews.)The first generation of Rothschild brothers were self-made men, admired for their financial brilliance and scorned for their lack of European culture. During the upheavals of the Napoleonic era, they settled in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Naples and Vienna. Salomon (1774-1855), founder of the Austrian branch, had ...”

“... did help to normalise the psychedelic experience. He was, Jay writes, ‘an adept of spiritual self-discovery, but also a stand-in for a sober general public to whom, until the arrival of mescaline, all mind-altering drugs had been “dope”, of interest only to bohemians, foreigners and criminals’ – the Michael Pollan of his time.*In the aftermath of ...”

“... seized on every opportunity to secure not just better living conditions but more autonomy and self-expression for themselves and (especially) for their children. But he shows too that they wanted to do that, if they could, while preserving neighbourliness and solidarity – while insisting, indeed, that solidarity and aspiration were not antagonistic ...”

“... left her well provided for. To be sure, Krupskaya tended to dislike important and, in particular, self-important men, putting Shaw in a distinguished company that included Stalin and Trotsky. But rudeness, or at any rate grumpiness, was her forte, and it stood her in good stead in her career as an Oppositionist after Lenin’s death. She mocked Trotsky (also ...”

“... This was a reference to the Canadian TV show Slings & Arrows, where a white charlatan with the self-bestowed name Sanjay convinces the director of a Shakespeare festival that if he courts a younger generation with an incredibly offensive, nihilistic ad campaign – billboards reading F*CK YOU, showing current elderly patrons of the festival on life support ...”

“... it comes to crassness. She refers in passing to the film producer and director William Castle, a self-styled ‘master of gimmicks’ who specialised in cheerfully excessive horror movies, only to state in the next sentence that her book will concern itself with more ‘esoteric’ matters. During the 1950s, Hollywood sought to fend off the threat of ...”

“... towards knowledge is all the more uncertain when the knowledge pursued is knowledge of the self. But the little tricks our minds play on us have proved to be fine doors into the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured patterns when we press on our closed eyes? Why do amputees still feel ...”

“... from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977). Like Wanja, Kilimadame is unmarried and self-sufficient. Her little shop becomes a place where the ‘important’ men of the village relax and discuss ‘the latest news from the capital’. Like the fictional Ilmorog in Ngũgĩ’s novel, Nyamata is undergoing a process of modernisation, which allows ...”

“... adulthood to overcome his doubts and realise that his revelations demanded lifelong struggle and self-abnegation. But Mani did not unexpectedly become the ruler of the world at the age of fourteen, divine good fortune of a sort that might supercharge anyone’s belief in their god. Profound conviction, a sense of his deity’s absolute majesty and his own ...”

“... in the street by a man roaring ‘You are a whore, you are a private whore, and you Know your self to be a whore’ – to physical and sexual assault: a woman selling oysters was raped by three men at a Newgate Street tavern in 1753. Over time, male hawkers become more visible (and audible) in the records, though Taverner argues that this was not because ...”

“... Her ferociously high standards have led her to withhold from Ludo the identity of his father, a self-important philistine she once slept with out of politeness and never set eyes on again. She decides that repeated viewings of her favourite film, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, will provide him with appropriate ‘role models’, and a strong ...”