“... pity and horror no less than wonder; nor does it shrink from displaying the fears and passions and self-deceptions which their life naturally causes men to conceive and to act on. Mr Griffin expounds this poetic vision with great force and clarity. He is also familiar with a wide range of epic poetry and historical narrative from cultures which were neighbours ...”

“... The sentences are wildly peripatetic and his philosophy, by Shavian standards, shockingly self-indulgent. He has equipped himself with all the apparatus of happiness: the glass of wine (champagne); the reference library of verse and prose; the loaf of garlic bread; and Thou at the end of a telephone line. Flying from one festival to the next, he ...”

“... semantic plurality. He is suggesting that such a systematic duality of meaning radically flaws the self-consistency of the text, and that it is in the nature of written discourse to be so flawed. Equally, when Derrida considers the alternative possible readings of Mallarmé’s ‘Mimique’, he does not allow us to rest with the convenient notion of ...”

“... world – thus failing to explain why the rank and file seem so regularly to find sound reasons of self-interest to support their leaders’ supposedly selfish causes. The catch-phrases in the Marxist explanation of why workers put up with the unbearable – the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the employers, the ‘co-optation’ of the unions, the weight of ...”

“... and collective action rediscover the miraculous in our symbolic social universe, we will remain self-constituting and engaged.’ The task for sociology is therefore a tough one: America, in a post-Vietnam depression and in a mood of enthusiasm for ‘increasing financial capitalisation of magic’, may well need the alternative succour of ...”

“... the victims of war and famine, one has made a choice, and it is not as obviously a morally self-justifying one as Tuan and those who share his views believe. I am not saying that we ought not to be considerate to animals, nor suggesting that a humane concern for their welfare is simply an escape from more important obligations. Such compassion makes ...”

“... High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost. As his rather odd title implies, P.H. Newby’s book is an attempt at the ‘Times’ as well as the ...”

“... letters, rejoinders, poems and memoirs) is not an exercise in explanation: it is an exercise in self-indulgence. As a political statement, it adds relatively little to Thompson’s last collection of essays, published in Britain as Zero Option and in the United States as Beyond the Cold War. And as a literary effort, it is in every way inferior ...”

“... capacity for understanding emotions collapses into egotism, as it has done very blatantly in this self-contradictory paragraph: ‘The world of men’s emotions is a difficult one for a woman to enter or to understand. Because women are used to responding with their feelings and certainly used to talking about them, they have a much greater opportunity to ...”

“... appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but ...”

“... ambitions. It says something either for its political naivety or, more probably, for its self-absorption that it did nothing of the sort. In the years after Mrs Thatcher came to power the BBC continued to grow. It added around three thousand staff to its already large payroll. It expanded into further areas of broadcasting. And when the licence fee ...”

“... end of the play Arthur declares: ‘I am no author of my history.’ The play genially hands out self-conscious chuckles, sometimes even without nudging you in the ribs as it does so. Accompanying the play are two contesting sets of notes. One set is ascribed to an earnest Shakespearean scholar called Roland Verre, whose name implies that in him scholarly ...”

“... the cognitive science programme at Yale, sees her two disciplines as mutually reinforcing, in the self-declared spirit of Aristotle and Hume. The cognitive sciences, she argues, shed light not only on various first-order questions in philosophy (especially those in philosophy of mind and action), but also on how traditional armchair philosophy, pace the ...”

“... beliefs that would otherwise be irretrievable. Ultimately, the magic of The Arabian Nights is self-designating, instanced in what the stories effect as much as in what they relate. ‘Shahrazad’s ransom tale-telling could be described as a single, prolonged act of performative utterance,’ Warner explains, ‘by which she demonstrates the power of ...”

“... his work has moved in the other direction, detecting an excessive investment of energy in early, self-contained sections (the runaway balloon in Enduring Love, the Arctic expedition in Solar), to the detriment of the books as wholes. McEwan has displayed a wide variation over his writing career, in terms of the relative level of ambition in individual ...”