“... algorithm will be all interconnections and no unity, a hyperactive brain void of the purposeful self-consciousness that might alone make it a bearable human habitat. Whatever has for a narrator a 30-year-old software analyst who finds vacuity everywhere that he looks or goes, and his own life to be very nearly as pointless as everyone else’s. Only very ...”

“... of the previous war and an undoubted patriot, should have withdrawn into depression, defeatism and self-pitying uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the ...”

“... philosophical questions, notably theories of perception and mental association. Between pride and self-doubt, the author himself declares that most people will not be able to understand this material, and should not try. Across a striking hiatus in MS, we are then led to a vigorous magnification of the imagination as the supreme element of poetry, and an ...”

“... America about discipline and impersonality, an unpalatable intrusion into a theatre cursed by ‘self-loving earnestness’ and ‘ “serious”, eyes-glinting, next-door realism’. These failings are exemplified in productions of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (‘Auschwitz in New York’) and of Büchner’s ‘noble and complicated’ play Danton’s ...”

“... its modern expression in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia and the Pays Basque’. The self-evident rottenness of the timber that stokes the fire is beside the point: what matters is the fire, the heat of it and the light it throws. (Which is not to deny that in the case of poets better than either MacDiarmid or Graves we respect the soundness of ...”

“... to majority rule on specific policy issues. The framers of the American Constitution were self-conscious in their design of checks and balances, many of which stand as impediments to majority rule. The separation of Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, the territorial design of the election system, the bicameral character of the ...”

“... puts on external behaviour. Genuine as an individual’s motives and interests may be, his outward self may grow into something far apart from his other or ‘own’ self, playing a part that he has to make an increasing effort to live up to. While strength and faith hold out it keeps him going, but at the peril of an ...”

“... ha ha – for he was certainly an opera buff, even if his expertise may in part have rested on a self-confessed preference for ‘fleshy women’ over skinny ballet dancers. When the 24-year-old Callas appeared on the Verona scene in 1947, his friends described her as ‘a sack of potatoes’. Meneghini was then a dashing bachelor of 52 who had made a lot of ...”

“... iceberg than the ship’ – and casually lists the lovely features of her shores as if they were self-evident: ‘On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.’ She can sneak in as much strangeness as any Martian, making the unearthliness of her creatures more apparent by approaching them with domestic similes: man-of-war birds ‘open their ...”

“... have felt some difficulty in settling down to life as an official. He did not lack enterprise or self-confidence – far from it – but no doubt the former businessman was used to going his own way with less interference. Far different were these helots he had now to work with! ‘Your typical civil servant is a terrifying product, almost, even so early as ...”

“... whose whole lives have been spent in the Labour Party can both leave that party and continue with self-respect in politics; and it is not the Liberal Party (in other words, it does not have the image of the eternal loser). The SDP has, above all, added to the Liberals the vital element of credibility, so that people will now actually vote the way they used to ...”

“... satisfaction. He is shrewdly alert to his own and others’ weaknesses, and exempt from vanity and self-pity. He doesn’t imagine that he or they have much to give, that promises are worth making or grieving over when broken. Death has been memorably frequent in his life, and birth rare. One of the few gifts he remembers making is associated with the birth of ...”

“... do-gooder who reveals himself as a hypocrite, and even takes credit for the frankness of his self-denigration. ‘Clamence’ explicitly denotes clamans – the false John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: it also, I believe, has overtones of clemency, though in this partial self-portrait Camus in no way spares ...”

“... who falls in love with her. They move into a flat in Earl’s Court, and, through indifference or self-destructiveness, she serves him a meal containing pork. Without the very careful setting – that wasteland between the A4 and the A30 – the story would lose much of its impact. The most terrible image is not one of physical violation, but of the evidence ...”

“... wondered who would be there Worthy of being his true self to. A girl there           babys her eyes and sends her gaze Widening to wander through The sipping archipelagoes Of frantic islands. Graham’s eclectic techniques and sense of continuity in a national tradition help him to sound timeless when ...”