“... present participle which too often impart a leaden rhythm to his prose. The danger of this art is self-parody, but Ballard is often at his most effective when he is parodying other people’s styles. He frequently uses the diary or logbook as a narrative form, and in War Fever he develops an incisive vein of political satire. The volume also contains witty ...”

“... certainly can’t. The accumulation of examples convinces me that James’s later style was often self-indulgent, and that he himself as a reader did not appreciate the virtues of his own earlier works – particularly when they were much earlier. There was often a distance of some thirty years between James the Reviser and James the First Author. One of the ...”

“... Francesca recalls Great Expectations. The grammar-school boy hero, Colin Ferguson, is the son of a self-improved, atheist, socialist, environmentalist schoolmaster father. The characterisations are as easy to take apart as lego, each piece a pet Scruton peeve. A sensitive youth, given to swooning when his problems press, Colin falls in love with the beautiful ...”

“... the population was enmeshed in an alternative power network. The story of this struggle for self-definition and counter-definition is awash with hunting terms: chases, beaters, tracking, driving, baiting, trapping. Gradually, the hunted became the hunters. The outlaws learned to assert a law of their own – of legitimate ...”

“... into parking lots, Malls, outlets, chains, et cetera. This is our hero, Erisychthon; Ex-boxer, self-styled entrepreneur, ex-con (Wire fraud, two years in a white-collar ‘Country Club’) after which The town received him back With open arms. Why not? He’d made them rich, Some of them anyway, besides He had a certain big man’s swagger People admire; a ...”

“... you and I already drinking brandy and everyone else is still drinking wine?’ ‘Terry,’ the self-described Delta dirt farmer replies, ‘there was a saying in currency in the court of the Emperor Napoleon at the beginning of the last century: “Claret is for the ladies, and port for men but brandy is for the heroes.” ’ Morris’s account of his ...”

“... been raised. Le Premier homme is then, by Camus’s standards, a plainly conceived book: it aims self-consciously at the lyrical only once, and in a revealing connection (of which more in a moment). You might say that this was to have been his version of Les mots, the book that Sartre disingenuously claimed was his ‘farewell to fine writing’: the book by ...”

“... For a while Crick turned his attention to the origin of life (defined as the origin of the self-replicating molecules of DNA and RNA) and went so far as to suggest ‘directed panspermia’ – the seeding of Earth with self-replicating gemmules of nucleic acids from outer space – to account for it. But more and ...”

“... conditions; but the Antonine world described in his opening chapters is on the brink of self-destruction, and this will repeat the self-destructions of the Augustan principate and the Roman republic before it. The causes of this decay lie in the indissolubility, yet incompatibility, of republic and ...”

“... human being in most social circumstances would want: they include money and ‘the means to self-respect’. Sen’s own proposal is that the space in which the most basic equality is to be established is that of freedom itself. Rawls’s primary goods, he claims, represent means rather than ends: the only point of money as a primary good is its power ...”

“... South Coast. As a writer’s life of a certain kind – centrifugal, ‘simple’ in its attempted self-sufficiency – it is formidable, exemplary. For the biographer, it has a deal to offer: a subject with a cult following, but also with a certain amount of slack in his reputation (‘almost certainly Lowry is the least-known British literary genius of the ...”

“... for Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), the anti-government insurgency. ‘The brisk self-assurance of that piece now makes me wince,’ he says in the preface to his careful and informative book. ‘Like many foreign observers, I saw Mozambique through a South African lens, expecting to understand the country – and the war which devours it ...”

“... real and fallible ones such as the UN and the League of Nations. In 1900, however, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies were symbolised by the conflict between the British imperial military machine and the rebellious farmers of the Transvaal. The Boer War had started with the usual catalogue of military disasters, which to Wells (and many ...”

“... was that there were too many good solutions and the Government, being its usual inefficient self, couldn’t make up its mind which one it liked best. Glancing over his shoulder, the executive leaned towards me across the table and confided, man to man: ‘It’s like you’ve got a blonde, a brunette and a redhead, real glamorous gals, all lined up and ...”

“... only in so far as it embodied a religious idea which anonymous artists, renouncing any notion of self-expression or reputation, brought to their work through the practice of yoga. The Buddhist stupa or Hindu temple image, then, was designed to recreate for the spectator the same visionary connection with his subject that the artist had experienced through ...”