“... the sphere of public history where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity’, have been so seriously misunderstood, it is now the historian’s job to look afresh. Would that Tyerman had given more space to those processes of myth-formation. He briefly alludes in his preface to persons unspecified ‘who regard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which drew on images of workers in popular culture to argue that organised labour is no longer a self-conscious power in American life. In both, he was able to weave class, culture, politics and ideology into a consistent narrative and to connect local histories with national and global events. The same qualities are evident in Freedom’s Dominion. The book ...”

“... entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily limited. Brewer’s plan to use it as ‘a database and as a finding aid’ works – up to a ...”

“... the end ‘ethnographic Surrealism’ (to borrow a term from James Clifford) aimed to estrange the self rather than to understand the other; in L’Afrique fantôme, for example, we learn far more about its author, Michel Leiris, than we do about Africa. Contemporary exhibitions such as Surrealism beyond Borders at Tate Modern and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean ...”

“... leaders that they will be able to soften any reforms through a consultation process. These self-imposed strictures reminded me of a scene in the memoirs of David Kirkwood, who in 1922 became the Labour MP for Dumbarton Burghs. Kirkwood, a member of the ILP and a supporter of Scottish home rule, recalled that soon after his arrival in Parliament, he ...”

“... and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed people to self-identify their legal sex but was blocked by the Tory government in Westminster) further alienated voters. Even more damaging was the creeping realisation that the SNP, like Labour before it, had failed to deliver on council tax reform, education or ...”

“... victory in the Six-Day War.In France, with its record of collaboration in the murder of the Jews, self-discovery by descendants and survivors of the Holocaust had to be taken one cautious step at a time. Many far-right French revanchists who regretted the loss of Algeria were also passionate antisemites and it paid for the Jewish community not to cause a ...”

“... moved effortlessly between genres, and were masters of irony and allusion. They were also adept at self-fashioning, to the point of complete deception. High-minded, sorrowful and penetrating indictments of court corruption and the evils of politics were written by men who were prospering in political life or desperately seeking political ...”

“... customs and shared ancestry. The difficulty can’t be evaded simply by accepting a group’s self-identification, which often incorporates similar analogies to natural kinds. Perhaps this is why Qureshi, who is well aware of the abuses of race terminology, vacillates between describing the humans facing extinction as ‘nations’, ‘native ...”

“... deferred to the military, as it often did, and accepted Lavigne’s claim that he had fired in self-defence.What unfurls is an astonishing narrative about the wages of the US’s covert wars abroad in the last quarter-century. Leshikar and Lavigne are not the only special forces operators whose stories of drug use and narcotic-related deaths are ...”

“... such weighty consequences.’ Increased population density led to the revival of trade and urban self-government; ‘seigneurial anarchy’, Bloch argued, was slowly being eclipsed by the modernising forces of the centralising state and the bourgeois freedom it allowed. Economic revival in France in particular took the form of internal, intensive ...”

“... 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 ...”