“... case study lurks here too: the uncertain tone of the Italian’s confessions, which veer between self-hatred, extravagant descriptions of himself as a monstrosity, and a frank acceptance of his nature and the pleasure he has found, is suggestive of the ways in which the ‘tragedy’ of being gay might be played up, not always consciously, as part of the bid ...”

“... of white supremacy. The atmosphere in the town is one of preserved time; too content and self-satisfied with its sense of liberality, it denies the history of New England while seeming to embrace it. It seeks to draw visitors into a cocoon of English colonial history, memorialising the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the ...”

“... case, between husband and wife.Lucie Nicolas (my grandmother kept her maiden name) was self-employed and independent. She would have been happy to be called petite bourgeoise – unlike her husband, who was resolutely classe ouvrière and had no truck with the hearth-crossing relationship with factory owners. When they dropped by with cloth ...”

“... with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism,’ an anonymous ...”

“... the Norman Conquest’. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this ‘colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe’. What English architecture might have been without the Reformation is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the ...”

“... was later established that other fires of the same kind had probably occurred in the past but had self-extinguished before being noticed. In this case, however, the fire took off. Inflammable gases produced by burning matter filled the space below the escalator; the wooden steps caught fire and the blaze spread to the two adjoining escalators. In the upper ...”

“... jobs at start-ups like OpenAI instead of moving on to postdocs. That year Uber decided to get into self-driving cars, identified Carnegie Mellon as a leading university, and hired forty of its staff in a single swoop. AlexNet was trained using two GPUs. By 2018 Stanford was using dozens and Google was running experiments on a cluster of 800. Realising that ...”

“... in the materials of art, rather than the appearances. There is a long meditation on Yves Klein’s self-created blue, the blue of the Madonna’s robe, the blue of lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, describing blue both as the colour of the sky – ‘space, emptiness, infinity’ – and also the colour of adornment, and a reminder of Charlie ...”

“... touch them not.Like Keats when enraptured, Owen at his most fervent moves beyond inhibition and self-consciousness, here boldly evoking both Christ’s Noli me tangere and his crucifixion. Such analogies were commonplace in the iconography of pro-war propaganda, and on occasion, as in ‘Le Christianisme’, were ridiculed by Owen himself, but here they ...”

“... as idiosyncratic characters with disparate views and concerns, often larger than life, with a self-confidence and contempt for conformity and its agents that might seem surprising in the context of the society they came from. His claims for their long-term historical significance are modest (even as he devotes almost eight hundred pages to their ...”

“... century did newspapers and novels, as we would recognise them, separate literary genres into the self-consciously factual and fictional.Both They Flew and Magus concern historical sympathy for the supernatural and the ways in which we plot change, whether along a deterministic timeline or a twisting route of highways and byways, sidings and dead ends. The ...”

“... controversial, even after the end of the dictatorship? While campaigning as running mate to the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, the now vice president, Victoria Villarruel, claimed that the president of the Abuelas, Estela de Carlotto, ‘with her face of a good little grandmother, has justified terrorism’.The Abuelas have relatively high ...”

“... equally intent on breaking and reassembling societies to serve their fierce and strange urges to self-realisation. Beware dreamers ...”

“... movement. If anything, the Foro Madrid’s image of these organisations is more accurate as a self-portrait in reverse: a well-funded, internationally co-ordinated effort to devise an ultra-conservative agenda for the whole region that would reimpose ‘order’ in the name of ‘freedom’.Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of Latin America’s ...”

“... figures down.) There’s a lot of suitable talk about giving people confidence, adding to their self-esteem, helping them to ‘reintegrate’, to raise their heads from the ground-staring position. Someone involved with the magazine told me that selling the paper taught the vendors how to become, she said, ‘like tele-sales people’. It’s an ...”