“... like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction – the self-confidently didactic style of S. L. Aluko, the engineer who wrote One Man, One Wife and One Man, One Matchet, informing the outside world about Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke. Like Aluko (or Henry ...”

“... them are crude. Hammett’s ‘stark realism’ and ‘plausibility’ are repeatedly invoked as self-evident indicators of merit; it’s ‘imaginative’ but ‘misguided’ to interpret Red Harvest as a Marxist parable because the union leader in that novel is ‘a hollow idealist whose arguments are unpersuasive’ and because ‘there are no masses of ...”

“... be ‘such a questionable shape’ On essentialism Ayer is uncompromisingly faithful to his early self and, as in much else, to Hume. The only necessities he is prepared to recognise, apart from the formally logical or mathematical, are those which analytically link, or separate, descriptions. Here he is, at least superficially, at odds with current doctrines ...”

“... persons at the expense of the community. Neither does the sense of justice proceed wholly from self-interest, though self-interest plays a leading part in its formation. The position is that because of his physical weakness a man can survive and prosper only as a member of a group, and that the scarcity of goods which ...”

“... letter to the Times focused on the way this artful rogue weaved potted criminology into his self-exoneration. In the Sutcliffe case, the public, widely welcomed a verdict of criminal responsibility and appeared to get some amusement from the judicial humiliation of the psychiatrists who sought to portray him as the hapless victim of his own ...”

“... Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a resilient veteran of many tumbles in such tourneys, and he seems to thrive on them, but because he is engaged on a scholarly patch that Dame Helen has made peculiarly her own (the prose of ...”

“... work, Towards the Great Civilisation, Radji could spot the Chalfont-Kim Il Sung shoot-self-in-foot syndrome and hastened to Ashraf’s side. He produces some pretty strong arguments against doing the book, but not enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled ...”

“... that Scott was a liar, fraud, sponger and crook and dismissed Andrew Newton as a perjurer and a self-advertising ‘chump’. This wasn’t the whole content of his very long summing-up, and at one time, as Waugh shows, he seemed to be suggesting to the jury that there had been a conspiracy to kill and not (as the defence suggested) to frighten. But the ...”

“... 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually intrepid and ...”

“... Central European, but surely Viennese – an amiable flibbertigibbet, equally futile and self-regarding; and the portraits are all the more effective for the unresentful forbearance which Ruth contriyes to exert. The period Fifties to Seventies, I suppose; the setting Chelsea and Paris; the atmosphere and detail extremely authentic; we never find ...”

“... there was no destiny, merely fate. For Yeats, authority was not exclusively a matter of self-discipline: it also implied the subjugation of others to precisely those forces which the self had, in achieving freedom, overcome. Or, on the other hand, there were those who surrendered their freedom, the possibility of ...”

“... of a Bildungsroman, with her experience offering Felicitas first an approach to God and then to self-discovery: but it’s experience subject to such strange emphases, and so distorted for purely satirical purposes, that Felicitas’s naivety is seen to be not hers so much as a necessary structural device, as in a latterday Candide. Father Cyprian, with his ...”

“... must reconcile ourselves to the fact that electronic man does not in all ways share our view of self and world. The majority of readers of the LRB will no doubt sigh regretfully in sympathy, but if I read Bolter correctly, it is not only the humanist who is thus challenged. ‘The issue is not whether the computer can be made to think like a human, but ...”

“... rates. Yet homeopathy very soon felt itself pinched between practice and orthodox inflation. Once self-styled scientific medicine came to run the health cartel the most percipient attacks on its authority have seldom come from those with shares in the monopoly. Doctors have been understandably quiet about their interests. Even their most strongly argued cases ...”

“... on the surface, perhaps, but profoundly significant when viewed from the standpoints of male self-identity and of national self-image. There is no doubt that the hair-cutting order drove many communities that might have surrendered peacefully into open and usually fatal resistance to the newly appointed magistrates of ...”