“... commonly rely upon a concept of desert, which itself depends upon a wholly mysterious concept of self-determination, and I do not see how there is any place for such concepts if, to the extent to which an action is not completely determined by physical or mental causes, it has to be viewed as occurring by chance. On this point I agree with Honderich, who ...”

“... conforming, in her struggle from faith to free-thinking, to a recognisable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive ...”

“... street theatre in all this – people arguing for the sake of argument, rediscovering the joy of self-expression after years of self-repression. I went for the first time just before the Party Conference in July. At six o’clock, the square was already packed with people. In one of the largest groups, an impressive young ...”

“... the other hand, lost at least as many admirers as Cabrera Infante for his continuing (some thought self-interested) loyalty to Castro after the show-trial of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. And Octavio Paz forced many readers to make an awkward distinction between his political views and his writing when, late in life and in the name of order, he ...”

“... is the most important variable. And hardly anyone now believes what seems to me historically self-evident: that the best way of solving a social problem is to throw money at it. What is important here is not that New Labour denies something self-evident, but that the Labour Party, individual exceptions apart, has ...”

“... aspire to be) junkies, the damage that anorexic and beautiful models inflict on the consumer’s self-image and, on the other hand, the social progress fashion is making by giving stylistic space to those not usually represented in ads. There is comparatively little discussion of the self-esteem or health of the workers ...”

“... Muslim world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims. Anti-American Iranian Shi‘ite Muslims were self-evidently bad; anti-Communist Sunni Muslims self-evidently good. The United States and Pakistan were the main powers behind the ‘anti-Soviet jihad’ but China also joined in, not only helping arm the Mujahidin but ...”

“... conscription of long-dead people into our own causes; and, worst of all, our pharisaical self-satisfaction at always being historically on the right side. Thus we adopt towards past people, our poor relations, an attitude of pity tinged with contempt, reserving praise for those ‘ahead of their time’ who, we think, were striving to be more like ...”

“... lets Eunice down his ‘souvenirs’, those ‘exercises of memory’ so precious to his sense of self, would ‘stink’. ‘A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.’ Ijah makes no propaganda for what he has become – a legal and political adviser to bankers on foreign loans. He prefers to interest himself in the ...”

“... to think that a sign-relation is built into nature is to revert to the idea that there are ‘self-identifying objects’ and ‘species’ there ... Such an idea made sense in the context of a Medieval world view ... In the context of a 20th-century world view, by contrast, to say in one’s most intimidating tone of voice ‘I believe that causal ...”

“... 15 of his 53 years as a tinplate worker, and six more (and very valuable ones they were for his self-education) immured in Dorchester Jail. This is a well-researched and notably sympathetic study of a difficult man. Its limitations are partly due to Wiener’s narrow focus and partly inseparable from his hero. Apart from his publicist ventures in the late ...”

“... Walter Benjamin, and from the dependable Emerson: ‘Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.’ Here is the touch of wonder required for Rortian aphorism. It isn’t to be found everywhere among the thousands Gross gives us, but there is no dearth of material, the aphoristic mines are not worked out, and we need not fear a shortage of edifying ...”

“... that America was lacking in soul.’ Bettelheim’s tone of cultural superiority and unhesitant self-assurance is nowhere more annoying than in his discussion of the Oedipus complex. After being told that most of his American graduate students have had ‘only the scantest familiarity’ with either the Oedipus myth or Sophocles’s play, Bettelheim treats ...”

“... It was Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, of Private Property and the State. Joe’s self-education raised him from his peasant origins to a sense of himself as an intellectually aware member of the industrial proletariat. Muriel’s education was a process of unlearning the attitudes of the Middle-American plutocracy into which she was ...”

“... richly rewarding to American writers. Blue Rise is set in Mississippi, but it is far from being a self-congratulatory old-time wallow. The inhabitants know how quaint their culture is and sell it in antique shops. It is Mississippi revisited, by Jeannine, a young woman who has escaped from it to marriage in a northern city. She is astounded on her return to ...”