“... produced artificial intelligence programs that have ‘gone critical’ and achieved humanlike self-consciousness. Herein lies a favourite theme of Gibson and Sterling: the official institutions of a society always work on yesterday’s agenda, while the future is being made by an underground of anarchists, criminals and fanatics. The ...”

“... few years’: that is, he is old, not just growing old. He dwells, sometimes specifically, never self-indulgently, on the attendant disadvantages. Yet the tone and style are, very agreeably, much as they were when the author was merely senescent – quietly distinctive, largely resigned, a bit grumpy. The locutions are occasionally a touch arthritic, as when ...”

“... of the river, dying, in defeat’: those are the cadences not of regret or heroism but of a fading self, the music of disappearance. Bolivar sees a woman at night in his encampment. She is singing a popular song under her breath: ‘Tell me it’s never too late to die of love.’ Almost certainly there is no one there, and Bolivar’s servant, in later ...”

“... of Innisfree’ and to WBY’s later poems, but the comparison defeats them. The redundancy, the self-caressing repetition – ‘the little lakes, the little colleens by the lakes’ – show that the lyrical surge is to be released from any obstacle, any knowledge. When we come to ‘that heaving place of his own heart’, we know that the claim of ...”

“... never know what’s really going on so they are easy to trick), and a greater readiness for self-sacrifice. Of course men sacrifice themselves too, and they get to do it with panache, their sacrifice crowned either with success or by a hero’s death. Noble women, on the other hand, are ‘presented as slogging on ... and on and on’. No wonder women ...”

“... suggesting that Hamburg’s medical establishment clung to an exploded medical theory out of crude self-interest; nor is he postulating a Marxist notion of false consciousness: he is arguing – very convincingly – that medical conceptions are not autonomous, the sterile cultures of laboratories, but possess social roots and social functions. Koch had shown ...”

“... only in its engaging underlay of humour. Harriet is one of those narrators who are skilled in self-delusion, who make plain to the reader things they prefer not to acknowledge themselves – in this case, the rottenness of Crishi, who is on the make, and worse. (He is, in fact, a cad whose literary ancestors may include the central figure in Francis ...”

“... ornamental and anachronistic institution’. He writes, not by royal appointment, but as the self-appointed demystifier and debunker. He dates most of the mystification and bunk to the last quarter of the 19th century, when the invention of tradition took wings in creating a more appealing image for the monarchy: ‘the hitherto unpopular and reclusive ...”

“... He remained basically a short-story writer, whose later works became increasingly literary and self-referential. He rewrote Marco Polo’s conversations with Kubla Khan in Invisible Cities, and, in If on a winter’s night a traveller, he produced a novel both containing and commenting on the first chapters of a whole series of imaginary novels. The ...”

“... Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams because, unlike his, they are real. His solace is a black taxi-driver, with whom he cruises innocently at ...”

“... field’ for a common American culture. Seeing themselves reflected through Rogers’s self-effacing eyes, Americans moved through Indian dispossession, war, depression and class struggle while remaining on familiar ground. In what Ray Robinson calls his mode of ‘polite but sly insult’, gentle mockery was inseparable from national ...”

“... the fern higher than our tents, growing among such beautiful trees. I could quite fancy my-self in a large English park.’ Given this acute sense of home, of what was left behind, it is all the more remarkable that Fanny Eden manages to order and express perceptions of her immediate surroundings with such energy, and even convert her occasional sense ...”

“... a quite large number of British citizens. To begin life in the working class, climb out of it by self-help and the educational ladder, and find oneself, in early adulthood, living in a world almost inconceivably different from that of one’s childhood: the familiar story was successfully told by Richard Hoggart thirty years ago, and it was a recurring topic ...”

“... and of the pressures under which they operated. The style is the same as that of his earlier work: self-effacing, unemotional and efficient. The clash of ideas and personalities is relegated to the background; lines of institutional development and decision-making set the parameters of the story. One senses that precisely because of the highly-charged and ...”

“... an improbable-seeming name, perhaps, in this context – Menachem Begin’s White Nights. The self-excited, voyeuristic fervour of Norman Mailer’s reveries about crime and the nature of the criminal belong to another world entirely. Two final points. First: how foolish and dangerous it is, in thinking about the nature of the Soviet system, to minimise ...”