“... the government through hot and cold wars – and cast themselves in the trusty frontier mould of self-made men and women. Like Westerners throughout American history, they deeply resented the East Coast establishment. Why did social prestige accrue to effete, Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph ...”

“... his family draws near haunts the whole book, between the lines as well as in intense episodes of self-questioning. Who was this person who was ‘going on the pilgrimage’, ‘en anthropologue’, as he initially imagined, for research? There are obvious schematic answers. A Moroccan trained academically in Morocco and France, he has lived in ...”

“... with this notion is that it assumes security is a transparent concept, unsullied by ideology and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called it, which no one can ‘possibly do without’ – it is immune to politics. Yet, as Arnold Wolfers wrote years ago, security is an ‘ambiguous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... didn’t, and died a month later.) But when Larkin’s letters are published he says: ‘All that self-loathing, at full spurt, bubble, ooze & drip. His tribe laps it up.’ The letters are ‘stinking bile-green weeds’.Like Larkin, Hughes was a devout monarchist, and this shows in a letter to the Queen Mother thanking her for having him and his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hundred years.) Cromwell was so shattered by this debacle that he made one of his retreats into self-communion. Why had Providence abandoned him in this great endeavour? Typically, the answer he came up with was not that the expedition was a grandiose non-starter, and appallingly managed – all the objections Lambert had made in council. No, God had ...”

“... seems to have quietly slipped away. The plague, Camus’s narrator remarks, was losing ‘its self-command, the ruthless almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto’. Mathematics flattens. It is a killing art. Counting humans, alive or dead, means you have entered a world of abstraction, the first sign that things have taken a ...”

“... networks such as Fox News with rival tribal television networks. American TV news today creates a self-referential world of half-truths and alleged plots that is consumed by its viewers for hours every day. Many Fox viewers don’t watch anything else and describe the channel as an important part of their lives. Many in the UK will resist the idea of partial ...”

“... flirt with his subjects, many of whom started out as lovers, drawing them out of their shells of self-protectiveness. (It helped that he preferred to use a Rolleiflex camera, held at his waist rather than at eye level, meaning that his camera did not obscure his face.) He wanted his photographs ‘to be seductive’; of his later erotic photos of men ...”