“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... in Bergoglio, whose meekness, Vallely writes, ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline. ‘In Pope Francis humility is an intellectual stance and a religious decision. It is a virtue which his will must seek to impose on a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two years; the number of waged Hispanic employees fell by about 56,000 and the number of ‘self-employed’ rose by 25,000. The Public Policy Institute of California, which crunched the numbers, argued convincingly that these trends were not driven by recession. But it was legislation in 2010 that felt to Hispanics like a declaration of war. SB1070, as ...”

“... to the parallel cult of ‘pristine’ wilderness. Devotees of both practise a highly selective, self-induced blindness, cancelling from their view, and all claims to their sympathy, everything that intrudes on their preconceived pictures of how landscape ought to be. This sort of mental bulldozing tends to bring real bulldozing in its wake, in fits of ...”

“... it wasn’t the Queen of the Fairies that had beguiled her. It was something lodged in her own self, a wet, dark, sweetbitter, slightly greeny, timeless wraith, which longed to exist in its own right, to have its own, independent life, to swim or fly or just walk free, dark and perverse enough to glamour the world for ever with its eerie light. I ...”

“... is absolute. The argument between vanity architecture and random post-architectural infill, self-designed termite colonies wedged into every nook and cranny, is presented in all its naked absurdity. The great white monster stadiums, with their choked plants withering in stone beds, are a beached fleet. The Peace and Friendship Stadium (which hosted the ...”

“... conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance’. He attended the first Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin, but was repelled by its fanatical anti-Communist rhetoric, which reminded him of Nazi rallies. He was never a Cold Warrior and, although he seems to have kept MI5 informed of ...”

“... of male speech – a kind of reverse Philomela.13What I’m pointing to here is a critically self-aware ancient tradition: not one that directly challenges the basic template I’ve been outlining, but one that is determined to reveal its conflicts and paradoxes, and to raise bigger questions about the nature and purpose of speech, male or female. We ...”

“... Helm wants to put it in such stark terms. Sacrificing democracy for the sake of the planet seems self-defeating, since democracy is one of the things we need to preserve if we’re to have a sustainable future. Yet at any given moment democracy looks more like part of the problem than part of the solution. Helm’s answer is to take the long view: tighten up ...”