“... Klein lived in the city and visited the school in 1925 – Isaacs encouraged curiosity and self-expression, characteristics she believed were clouded by adults’ confusion of moral and causal categories (a confusion they later attributed to the ‘primitive’ minds of children). When the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget told a child he must ...”

“... philosophy. Professor Arrowsmith in his enthusiastic introduction calls the essay ‘pure self-projection’, and reads it as an assertion of intellectual independence. A declaration of war on the current notion of philosophy as practised by ‘academic ruminants’ is what Nietzsche himself called it, but of course it is a declaration disguised as ...”

“... half-way through Swallow. Most surprisingly, the tone of the narrative is wryly comic and often self-mocking. It’s an unexpected treat after the sledgehammer jokes of Summit and the lecherous self-pity of Dreams and Hallucinations. Thomas’s comedy begins with his fictional characters demanding equal billing as authors ...”

“... or humility towards movies’, as making ‘only a cynical show of superiority and self-importance’. In the title essay Wenders deplores the incapacity of modern audiences, indulged and debased by the hollow consumerist ethic such criticism reflects, to appreciate the beauty of John Ford’s Westerns; he is pained by ‘the increasingly ...”

“... then abandons them and asserts its own programme and values with an astonishing lack of caution or self-examination. Anyone who asks RLT proponents to look at their own assumptions is not treated as an intellectual soul-mate, but instead angrily denounced as a bigoted member of the old order. RLT brooks no opposition and no questioning. (Joseph Schumpeter’s ...”

“... he and others like him kept open alternative possibilities. He, too, deplores the exiles’ self-serving division of the country into black and white, good and evil, and its indiscriminate branding of all those who remained after the coup as at least covert supporters of the regime, pinochetistas. Perhaps this would not have mattered so much if the ...”

“... does little to ground in reality: the clubbing to ‘death’ by Lucas of the Russian Jew and self-styled psychoanalyst, Peter Mir. Lucas has lured his brother Clement to ‘a small park in North London’ under the pretext of showing him some glow-worms. As Clement (Abel) peers under a bush for these evanescent beasties, Lucas (Cain) makes to beat him ...”

“... it’s so full of mannered and repetitive remarks, and because Cocteau works so hard at his self-admiration. ‘I am the model of an anti-intellectual,’ he says, but only a certain sort of intellectual would say any such thing. The sort who speaks grandly of ‘the accident we call life’ and ‘that dreadful state of childhood from which I shall ...”

“... is that the new state would be truly transitional towards the practicable limits of its own self-dissolution into the associated life of society as a whole.’ But this marked the end of his early expectations. By then, he knew that Régis Debray had been right: the events in France in 1968 announced a voyage to China which, like ...”

“... is almost always seen as a disguise of some sort, and at the same time as an announcement, a self-chosen spectacle. In her novella, The Fair Jilt (reprinted in modernised spelling in the Penguin), the central characters have to get dressed for their trials, and for their executions. Miranda, the heroine (or villain) of the piece, has had her sister ...”

“... On the day the author is approached by Hubert and Rysio, two old lags from the Underground, the self-styled ‘keepers of a dying flame’, themselves ironically three-quarters dead, with their outrageous and bland request that he sacrifice himself for their cause – he is after all, expendable – on that day, Poland is receiving a state visit from its ...”

“... is that their defence of minority culture was undermined by their obsession with the very forms of self-promotion and publicity-seeking which they so stridently condemned. There is a need for serious thinking about Leavis’s legacy, but unfortunately this book does not provide it. Ten years after his death, his literary-critical writings tend to promote ...”

“... got the wide reading it deserves. The standard mythology that pictures gays as pouty, shallow and self-obsessed doesn’t come close to applying here. Two things happen to most of the gay men in the book: they contract Aids and suffer horribly from it, or they devote themselves to a friend or to friends with the syndrome. They visit, give presents, cook and ...”

“... than it tries to look: here again what is striking is not the new achievement but the new self-admiring rhetoric. Is it the case, he asks, that there is a general belief in the obvious (traditional, authoritarian) single meaning of a text, a belief which must therefore be demystified and deconstructed? No, few hold such an opinion; what is being ...”

“... the price of progress. Comparison with Asia suggests that on balance Europe benefited from its self-imposed ordeals; elsewhere, both society and business enterprise were too inert to generate such struggles. There can always be too much of a good thing, no doubt. Wars were being fought on a grander scale than ever before, and made correspondingly greater ...”