“... than a robot that carried around its own blueprint? Or might it be endowed with some degree of self-awareness? The contents of consciousness are limited: thoughts flow serially, one at a time, and each seems to be the product of much implicit work we have no direct awareness of. The modern conception of thinking as computation has solidly supported the ...”

“... had long professed to help.’ As the peasants saw it, they were driven to resort to violence in self-defence: ‘Ideologically, chouannerie was a protest against the destruction of the moral unity of the peasant community.’ It was also a protest against the heavy-handed intervention of the towns and their National Guards against people whom the local ...”

“... worlds at once.’ The disparate paragraphs of his ‘Peter Simple’ column seem to support this self-analysis. If Wharton had more will-power he could be a playwright, easing himself into different roles, rapidly switching his persona. Sometimes he appears as a decent old buffer, a Victorian paternalist with faithful workers on his grand estate; but ...”

“... on purely nominalist foundations. To this extent ‘Helliconia’ belongs to the category of the self-conscious novel, not to the fiction of attempted prophecy. Brian Moore’s Black Robe is a revisionist historical romance, beginning as a rational renaming exercise but ending by reciting the familiar names of Christian worship. The missionary tale, in which ...”

“... necessity of illusions, a necessity to which it sometimes romantically gives way with a certain self-consciousness. Thus Cunha lucidly notes how the soldiers propagate atrocity stories about the jagunços (‘ruffians’) who were their opponents: ‘They believed such stories as these; they made them up, seeking in advance an absolution for their ...”

“... felt to be inadequate and inappropriate, and there was a tendency to turn to a more impersonal, self-authenticating ‘technical vocabulary’. It seemed to guarantee a kind of ‘object-ive’ writing which was otherwise constantly imperilled by all the other literature-soaked rhetorics currently available. A neat chapter on the explorer John Charles ...”

“... the midday sun. It would be a mistake to think of Marquez’s literary universe as an invented, self-referential, closed system. He is not writing about Middle Earth, but about the one we all inhabit. Macondo exists. That is its magic.It sometimes seems, however, that Marquez is consciously trying to foster the myth of ‘Garcialand’. Compare the first ...”

“... a central organising committee of booksellers and publishers based in London who rely on small, self-motivating committees around the country. But would we really want a single, centrally-organised event that for one week in 52 would bring books to the centre of our national life? We’ve been going about things differently, and perhaps not only because of ...”

“... She deliberately evokes the world of Julius and Augustus Caesar, where well-meaning, self-seeking senators slide nervously past the shadowy colonnades and smooth youths snatch bangles from the sleek arms of tempting girls beneath statues of Pompey and Hermaphroditus, while the street-gangs of Milo and Clodius achieve respectability by running ...”

“... of class, economics, bureaucratic systems and the like, concentrating instead upon the essences of self, nationhood, community and Zeitgeist.’ Now there’s something worth arguing about. The short answer is that he’s been reading Benjamin on Fascism as the culmination of the attempt to make politics aesthetic. The longer answer would need a context it is ...”

“... to be able to slug it out toe to toe with a dictionary (OAD) that does not announce its self-census, but probably weighs in at upwards of 70,000. But is one to conclude from that remarkable achievement that LNGD is a remarkable children’s dictionary, or rather that if its selection of vocabulary is really what ll-to-16-year-olds need, then ...”

“... Jacek Kuron, the driving force behind KOR, the Solidarity think-tank: ‘Can a revolution ever be self-limiting?’ A few days before his arrest in November, Kuron reaffirmed his belief that Solidarity had modestly to acknowledge Poland’s ‘geopolitical situation’ (Poland’s code phrase for admitting that it is in the Soviet sphere of influence): in ...”

“... Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad novelist, for he writes with a quite compelling ...”

“... to have stimulated James’. But it is never settled or predictable, and occasionally an ironic self-consciousness will emerge, as when he acknowledges that ‘the kind of name-dropping, rapid shifting of context, and unwillingness to stay for an answer which this [Deweyan] culture encourages runs counter to everything that a professionalised academic ...”

“... the Survey of London began life as one of those ventures in historical preservation and national self-regard which burgeoned in the 1890s and 1900s, and included the National Trust, Country Life, the Burlington Magazine, the Victoria County History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Historical Monuments Commission. All were concerned with ...”