“... institutions and social change. Rational Choice theory presents us with instrumentally rational, self-interested agents. It sounds as if such individuals, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, will never contribute to the common weal unless they gain more than they pay. Indeed, since each calculates in terms of his marginal costs and his ...”

“... readers who found the polemics of the two Vindications too rugged were delighted by the melancholy self-portrait of the Letters. All the same, there is a lot more to them than subjective egotistical Romanticism, or the delineation of a wandering female writing to a faithless lover. The thread of interest is always a double one, and the outer world is more ...”

“... The traditional self-contained, sensibly-proportioned novel, still very much the dominant influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey Harrison, with ostensibly the second (although in fact the first) volume of what looks set to become a monumental tetralogy, puts pressure on the boundaries of the form by insisting that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail ...”

“... modern guru, in spite of his occultism, in that what he offered was not simple salvation, but a self, that 20th-century Grail. Ignore your ‘personality’, be taught and find your real self. His most famous follower (though not for long), Katherine Mansfield, wrote when she joined his community shortly before her ...”

“... to haunt her.’ Much of Barker’s fiction is involved with that attempted exorcism. This self-reflectiveness carried with it the hazard of repetition, and Regeneration, published in 1991, consciously broke a compulsive pattern. It was a historical novel, based on the work of the Army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and ...”

“... a book, an autobiography, but these successes would be scoffed at by true-blue Balliol men. His self-belief was self-made, artificial. Theirs was ingrained, time-honoured. ‘I walked through Balliol in a daze, haunted by the thought that I was going to be part of a college that was nearly seven hundred years old. Seven ...”

“... cumbrously/flashily/winsomely, one should use craft and expertise to overthrow the stiflement and self-importance of craft and expertise – to be as uninhibited and fresh and airy as a beginner. Not continue to paint yourself into a corner with aching brush and paint gone hard, but take a line for a walk, as Tom Paulin says, taking a leaf from Paul ...”

“... according to Lonsdale, for the moral agency that legitimises or at any rate sponsors maturity and self-respect, in line with Kikuyu ancestral concepts of the difference between good and evil, between success and failure, eventually between life and death. On the internal evidence, to which Lonsdale is an indispensable guide, this moral compulsion – perhaps ...”

“... the ways in which a particular age imagines the Neanderthals is a guide to the forms of human self-delusion in vogue at any given moment. This is the theme that preoccupies Eric Trinkaus and Pat Shipman in their account of how the image of the Neanderthals has evolved over the years since their discovery. The Neandertals is thoroughly readable, in the ...”

“... the apparent enthusiasm among some early Christian women for asceticism, sexual renunciation and self-starvation? One favoured scholarly answer stresses the liberating possibilities of early Christian communities. Christian asceticism enabled women to (re)gain control over their own bodies and find an escape route from the patriarchal authority which ...”

“... to do than reality-history. This is above all true of the 19th century: the period offers its self-representations lavishly and insistently, but on the whole yields its realities reluctantly. If historical research never demanded more effort than is involved in boiling down views on some topic from the run of a 19th-century magazine the historian’s life ...”

“... answer to her father’s vision in the field of corn; it’s also a chilling expression of the self-destructive passivity of consumerism upon which the business-religion of The Propheteers feeds. Max Apple (whose name sounds as though it might have been dreamt up by C.W. Post in a vegetarian clean-up operation on fiction) has written a fascinatingly ...”

“... and order can be constructed but on the ways in which they can be shown to be fractured and self-refuting. It is this – the systematic privileging of disorder and a concomitant scepticism about the ways in which received authority has constituted itself – which characterises all the movements and ideas grouped as Post-Structuralism. Barbara ...”

“... her father’s raping her, by the utter hopelessness of a family destroyed from within by its own self-loathing, is allowed to become ‘all of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed’. Pecola’s madness is a form of flight; a form Morrison can explain but does not condone. A murderous ruthlessness becomes an alternative form of flight in ...”

“... wanted more: in several remarkable passages scattered across this journal at once perceptive and self-serving, he gives vent to his long-standing resentment against what he chose to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of ...”