“... automobile that takes us where we wish to go’ – which will be cheap because they are self-reproducing. Probably, ‘the self-reproducing machine will be partly made of genes and enzymes.’ During the next thousand years ‘we must expect’ that ‘collective memory and collective consciousness’ made ...”

“... the fourth syllable. Victorian hymn music came under attack early in this century, censured for self-indulgence, cloying chromaticism and ‘vulgar lusciousness’. These charges are accepted by Bradley a little too readily. Jolly though it is to hear the High Victorians accused of decadence, we may wonder how far the accusation is just; if these composers ...”

“... written after the move to revolutionary Cuba, is a summary of his life so far, in a self-portrait that’s not the work of a weak man: And after every episode – that’s what you had to call them – of travelling, loving, hating, working, talking, he was left inert, indestructible in a way, as though whole and untouched, not consumed, not ...”

“... If, as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their ...”

“... might have been a flattering likeness of Mrs Riddle into a masterpiece. Like Poussin’s great self-portrait in the Louvre, it is a painting about art and the making of art. Like Poussin, Cassatt places her sitter’s head in a series of framings which both hold it in place and call attention to the relation between the rectangles within the painting (one ...”

“... does get a little chilly in the long run, and Ulrich, like his creator, has a strange capacity for self-satisfaction alongside his gift for self-criticism. But the writing never stops being funny and illuminating, and we’d be lost if we had to approve of writers in order to keep reading them. Ulrich is a fully developed ...”

“... does occur more often than ‘judgment’ and ‘Hell’? Death is its ineluctable self. Yet it stands for much more besides, especially in the writings of St Paul. Marius should count the number of times that ‘death’ is mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans, and should consider its symbolic, religious meaning. Death meant sin. It was ...”

“... the audience sees: a remarkable figure, an artist reaching a popular audience with an art as self-conscious and self-referential as any élite audience could wish. Invoking a triad proposed by Jameson, Zizek sees Hitchcock as an exponent of realism (in his British films of the Thirties), of Modernism (in his American ...”

“... The attempt to wall Davis off in this way from some ‘real’ LA to which he does not belong is self-discrediting, as is the associated fantasy that insecure Angelenos have embraced Ecology of Fear to smear their city and curry favour with the New York establishment. It is also true, as Davis and his defenders point out, that no scholar’s footnotes could ...”

“... his ‘universe henceforth without master’, and the hero of these poems. The breach between the self and the world is the problem: ‘How to live without being torn between these infinities?’ Popa asked in one of the few short notes he wrote on poetry. What interests him is the dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his ...”

“... held it to be the prime cause of death, yet Evans-Pritchard could find no evidence of any ‘self-conscious’ witches among them. The question ‘Were there people who believed themselves to be witches?’ has thus long been excluded from consideration. But it seems that this self-denying ordinance is becoming ...”

“... which most often arises in businesslike discussions about where she should go to regain it (self-pity is utterly alien to her, though not entirely to Winston). The reader gets an impression of Clementine’s tendency to indisposition, owing largely to her confinements. But then here is a letter she wrote to Winston in 1913. I had such a lovely hunt ...”

“... hundreds of crabs scurry across the idyllic beach at Krabi in Thailand. They form a fractious, self-governing community which in many respects mirrors our own. They fight over territory, squabble over food and get along, with just enough co-operation to survive. What distinguishes humans from crabs, apart from the lack of claws, is the degree of ...”

“... fickle, less hopeless, that the loss is not their own fault. But it’s always best to doubt such self-serving conclusions. Generally, things are one’s fault, unless it can be positively proved otherwise. Anyway, sit me in front of Bringing Up Baby, The Wild Bunch or The Conversation and I’m ravished. It’s not the films I love that I’ve fallen out of ...”

“... and which could have been both profound and funny, just becomes a mildly embarrassing exercise in self-indulgence. Like any other early modern philosopher acting on a public stage, Descartes helped build his own monument, and it isn’t at all obvious that he would have been displeased with the hagiographic commentary that developed not only after his life ...”