“... contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a self-ratifying ‘Sense of Wonder’. This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ...”

“... more than a day at most. She must think of it as one day at a time. She must look composed, sexy, self-contained; mustn’t look needy and impatient for the others to arrive; must look like someone who can look after herself. While taking care at all times to act natural. What that meant in the short term was that she should make some breakfast. She hadn’t ...”

“... partly because of his lack of a Wordsworthian or Hazlittian egoism, his permanent and self-knotting tentativeness, something in the work will baulk or turn aside any reader. Hence the quality of the incomplete and the defeating that characterises Coleridge’s enormous body of work. Editing Coleridge is a heroic way of life. Until now, there has ...”

“... her all that she would need. Something else happened. She had asked for it. Jove in his thorough self made love to her. His lightning burned her flesh, ousted her breath. She lay as ashes with the Thunderer. One legend says she went to hell for this. Another saves her inexplicably. She is last seen with what she wanted most: A baby god and ...”

“... light the stranger’s way. The hero who has come to kill Asterion: her half-brother, my son. My self. They betray each other so perfectly: husband to wife, wife to husband; sister to half-brother, and now lover to lover. The symmetries of chaos and bliss. The mysteries. I am the true vine, I am the fennel stalk; and he will be honey: buried to the ...”

“... novel of initiation and development, in the course of which a young hero is led from adolescent self-absorption and egocentricity on the margins of the social world through a variety of instructive experiences – often a mixture of the erotic and the aesthetic – to a state of adulthood and responsibility at the centre of contemporary ...”

“... that the diarist is not immune from the effects of hindsight, ignorance, partiality, bias and self-justification in what he writes. In Crossman’s case, these distortions are not disabling. He is singularly free from self-deception and his candour often punctures his own pretensions. For instance, the ‘pretty good ...”

“... they supposedly tell about the gods.The distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now. In the words of Bernard Williams, a lie is ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes to be false, which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content’. That makes it relatively easy to ...”

“... age without reservation’; for the audience, ‘specifically aesthetic experience’ requires ‘self-abandonment to artworks’. As for the substance of history disclosed by true art, it is little short of agony. Adorno meant to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, and the few other modernists he singles out for praise (Kafka, Schoenberg and Celan among ...”

“... would like. Mad Men’s second overt challenge to its own glamour relies on the audience’s self-flattering sense of historical irony, on our consciousness of our social enlightenment relative to the 1960s. ‘How wonderful they look,’ we’re invited to think, ‘but how racist they are, how sexist, how homophobic, how reckless in their diet; what ...”

“... whose allegiances, manipulations and treacheries Mary McCarthy described with satirical (and self-satirising) play in her essay ‘My Confession’, published in Encounter in 1954.City College’s young men were determined to escape naivety and provincialism. They did not recognise the authority of Christian tradition and had little interest in Jewish ...”

“... a ‘political project’, the challenging of the inferiority complex that blights the Scots’ self-image. And the many collaborators on A Claim of Right for Scotland debate the case for last year’s document of that name: it is reproduced in full and seems to me much the most reasonable and impressive manifesto for Scottish nationhood in my lifetime. I ...”

“... Mutiny and has accelerated since Independence, that the country has been restored to an ancient self, while gaining a new freedom and self-consciousness – qualities which, India being India, have been attended, but not so far endangered, by rage, disorder, ‘a million mutinies’. The book does not argue for, or ...”

“... Right.’ To place the judiciary in this way on opposite sides of the same argument seems self-contradictory. Nevertheless it is true that the law, like most other things, has a variety of dynamics and imperatives, some of them at odds with others. Among these are the law’s promise, not of an infallible trial but of a fair one, and the rule that ...”

“... force of productive development for ‘the cunning of reason’ and the struggle of Geist to self-knowledge and self-realisation. Cohen, defending a ‘technological determinist’ interpretation of Marx, takes this line, referring to what he describes as ‘the identity of structure across diversity of ...”