“... 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 ...”

“... often know, human interaction is too complex for mimicry. Sinedu also taped hours of rambling self-questioning. She mailed long confessional letters to complete strangers, some of which were turned over to Harvard by the recipients; Harvard filed them away. ‘I hadn’t admitted her to my class because the writing she had submitted was ...”

“... not so much Omar’s original, to which he was introduced by his great friend Cowell, a brilliant self-taught linguist, but Tennyson’s In Memoriam. FitzGerald’s relations with Tennyson were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his ...”

“... well, he was sure of himself. If the author of The Future of Socialism did not have a right to self-assurance, who did? Very well, he was rude. That was a sign of a fundamental seriousness and egalitarianism. By the mid-Sixties, when I got into Parliament, I had become an admirer. Gaitskell was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was ...”

“... in transforming ‘life’ into a critical term, a touchstone of aesthetic value. He adopted a self-consciously awkward prose style and it may be due to his influence that good critical prose is now dismissed as ‘bellelettrism’ (see, for example, Stephen Trombley’s dismally representative approach in his study of Virginia Woolf). For many years, the ...”

“... the fact that God says yes to sexuality, and so abandon ourselves to Total Loving and shuddering self-realisation in the ‘Big O’, we are in fact being taken for a ride, and riding each other, in talk. To start with, somewhere in the 18th century, this talk was straightforwardly scientific. The sexual was defined and cognitively confined into a specialism ...”

“... open but real German, moving between Nuremberg and Europe. A third is the Dürer of the exhaustive self-documentation, letters, diaries, books and odd notes, as well as stunning self-portraits at most ages. But there is also something mythic about the man, in that he seems to play a Shakespeareanly fraught role, a role ...”

“... what d’ya mean? We’re not Irish – we’re British.’ They laughed at each other, but rather self-consciously. It was obvious they were discomfited, unsettled, and they flung themselves with increased vigour into another round of furious and distracting activity. This fascinating story follows a subtle and intelligent discussion of Loyalist ...”

“... of England’ series. Certainly it looks well with the other volumes already on the shelf: less self-referential than the work of Elton and Gash, broader in scope than Speck, more cogent than J.R. Jones, the book consummates a lifetime’s labour in the field of late Georgian British history. Christie’s approach is of a piece with the series as a ...”

“... his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative mother of the Messiah. None of this affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best masters of his ...”

“... progress is unlikely in principle to be both a clear and an uncontentious category of social self-understanding. Since it is such a global category and since what it aims to render more intelligible is the situation of societies in time, its significance is also always as much a matter of sentiment as it is simply one of causal understanding. To write ...”

“... consciousness or deliberation. Man can only re-attain this grace by completing his knowledge of self and world, thus returning to Eden by the back door. Judith, Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel, takes Kleist’s essay, with its switchback logic that equates god with puppet, as one of its main sources of meaning. Part of the book is set in an ashram in India ...”

“... works of Tennyson, Arnold and George Eliot as they came out. And his concern was unashamedly, even self-consciously to see everything in the context of the age. Thus, though claims cannot be made for the universality of his interests, it is by no means ridiculous to urge that those who wish to become thoroughly inward with the best that was thought and said in ...”