“... where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The Terminator, ‘I’ll be back,’ used as the title for one of the essays here (by Lianne McLarty), hovers over the sequel as – always – something between a promise and a threat. This is a highly competent and readable ...”

“... truthfulness, honesty, unselfishness, generosity, modesty, composure, thoughtfulness, and a self-denying lack of ambition for external recognition’ in Vincent’s list – reticence could only be a beneficent trait. It was also believed to neutralise secrecy’s demoralising tendencies. Gentlemen could be entrusted with secret knowledge without fear ...”

“... the magazines with a flushed listlessness. As the scene develops he becomes more paralysed and self-absorbed, an observer of the voyeurs, attending to the signs, but unable to go the whole way. ‘A large sign over the magazine rack says “Try Before You Buy is NOT Our Policy”. Mr Phillips feels too shy to actually pick up any of the magazines so he ...”

“... as Hegel and Royce, repeated his mistake when they defined reality as perfect knowledge or perfect self-consciousness. This, too, was an attempt to get rid of an abyss, this time by making our present epistemic situation continuous with the ideal epistemic situation – making our own network of mental states continuous with that of the Absolute. But this sort ...”

“... an accompanist) of his own’. It is a story about exploitation, possession and artistry, and very self-consciously of its time. It is a strange and artful book; and Du Maurier seems to me more archly attentive to what he is up to than Pick gives him credit for. When, for example, the narrator describes the talk of these young bohemian artists as not ...”

“... and triumph that spite, recrimination and finger-pointing follow one campaign and specious self-congratulation another though both were executed with the same skill and determination. Only the outcome was different – and that, again, mostly as a result of chance. After a hundred years in which the most inept British general could win wars in Asia and ...”

“... original editors ensured that the anthology was never just an accumulation of (verbally) self-contained texts which happened to be (materially) stitched together between two covers. The most obvious appeal of teaching anthologies is financial: word for word, the gold-embossed Norton costs less than the tattiest airport paperback. But the sheer ...”

“... with an avalanche of publicity. It calls into question the accuracy of the autobiography of the self-same Rigoberta Menchú, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, and revisits the old debate about the political impact in Latin America of the guerrilla warfare theorists who sprang up in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara’s romantic ...”

“... media?’ Borrow, it seems to me, never quite found that middle way. He tried very hard to fit his self-expression to the strict party-line of his religious superiors, but then he found he had disciplined himself so firmly that he was no longer free to write from the heart. The letters were as close as he could get to the party-line and he obviously did not ...”

“... from those imperfections in living organisms which betray a history of descent. The self-styled ‘scientific creationists’ have no leg to stand on and are simply playing politics. Natural selection must not be construed as a perfecting principle in any strong sense of perfection. Neo-Darwinists who look to adaptive utility as the key to every ...”

“... elaborate. Darnton is not suggesting that the imagery on which the cat-killings drew was entirely self-conscious, or that the killers ‘knew’ what they were doing to the extent that the ‘text’ they devised was meant to be ‘read’ by the master and his mistress with the same degree of precision with which the historian is able to read it. The power ...”

“... In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch ...”

“... inception more than three centuries ago.’ But the joke is right, since a proverb is often slyly self-referential. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ gets not only authority but comedy from its own brevity. Proverbs are inherently convinced, and therefore convince, that ‘Small is beautiful’ (1973). There are many proverbs that praise the little (‘The ...”

“... to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced. Of the ‘facts’ of early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only ...”

“... articles about their experiences and cunningly sweetening them up with nature notes. ‘Take this self-taught peasant for all in all,’ wrote the Times in 1835. ‘Cobbett remained to the end a peasant,’ wrote G.D.H. Cole in 1924 – and he printed as epigraph to his biography an elegy on Cobbett about ‘gentle nature’s stern prose bard, her mightiest ...”