“... 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 ...”

“... of this alchemy. As Kagarlitsky points out, classic social democrats imagined a series of self-conscious and graduated reforms, mounting through universal suffrage and labour organisation, ineluctably metamorphosing state and society without violence or rupture. Kautsky, Bernstein and others thereby sought to evade the boring reform/revolution ...”

“... did. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive drinker. He reported to the poet Georges Rodenbach that he would never forget ‘the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death-mask from his face, an operation in which part of his beard and mouth had come away too’. After the ...”

“... a man who pleased himself. If he could at the same time please others he would. His selfishness, self-absorption, and truth-to-self were all aspects of a belief in unmediated response. The implication in sculptural terms was that the veil of style would hide truth if one did not dedicate oneself to the observation of ...”

“... when it is attached to an interesting personal history. Of late, however, with his growing self-assurance, Brodsky has dared to dispense with these privileges, and in the course of the past decade has been writing poems in English that demand to be judged purely on their own merits. I assume that these are the poems on which Hofmann bases his high ...”

“... caution, which proceeds from a quite reasonable assumption that the ordinary reader doesn’t like self-admiring mucking around with language. It is a little less difficult to forgive the persistent, bogus anti-intellectualism. ‘Less’ here means more. Taylor seems at times to forget what he is saying. The book goes mattering on in the vein of the ...”

“... computer. Whichever of Warner’s observations and feelings and desires survived this rhetorical self-slaughter, they will come to us only after they have passed through Morvern’s idle and careless hands. After weeping a bit, and warming her knickers over the kettle, and going to the toilet, ‘remembering always to wipe backwards’, Morvern decides to ...”

“... traditions and slowly evolving customs’, and whose motto is ‘Love Thy Neighbourhood as Thy Self.’ Ethnically obsessed and stiflingly conformist, Communitaria is North American identity politics at its most Stalinistic: all cultures deserve equal respect, none can be criticised by another, and the self is rigorously ...”

“... translating them into our own system of numerals. So who has more number smarts, the present-day self-styled innumerate or the mathematically gifted German student from five hundred years ago? Brian Butterworth, a cognitive psychologist who has done much work on the neural and cognitive bases of mathematical thinking, says it’s a tie. The thesis of The ...”