“... 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 ...”

“... on my part. Read now, her article expresses something of the exasperation I feel myself at this self-indulgent young woman who knew better than her elders and cared so little about other people’s lives. But then I am now older than Betty Miller was when she wrote the piece. It also needs to be said that a very few weeks after that telephone call I was ...”

“... assertions remain suggestive and fecund: ‘Reynolds’s imagination lost some of its freedom and self-assurance when it ascended from the intermediate to the grand style. As long as he was translating the sublime into the fashionable, he was inventive and sure of his ground: when he reversed the process and attempted to raise the fashionable into the ...”

“... misconstrues his theory in a fundamental way: for it implies a theoretical recognition of self-righting market forces, albeit forces which are impeded in the real world. The authors’ discussion of the ambit of the ‘short period’ for this analysis is perhaps their most incisive contribution. Other papers in this volume, by J.A. Kregel on ...”

“... people were on the wane, though this as yet entailed no conspicuous deterioration, and no loss of self-assurance. Mark Bence-Jones starts with Irish hunting, and makes of it a daredevil and jovial business; next comes the sporty slaughter of many woodcock and pheasants. The Irish aristocracy acts true to type in this study, down to the display of ...”

“... City, a confidently exclusive little clique. Jeanne MacKenzie’s early chapters pullulate with self-deprecating Adonises and dark-haired lustrous beauties, and she seems respectfully incurious about events below the belt, tempting the reader to side with the sansculottes ... But when they rush off to war – all professing knightly devotion to Diana Duff ...”

“... was sharply put down by Mr Justice Bridge. The injuries, the judge concluded, had probably been ‘self-inflicted’. ‘It is quite apparent,’ he explained, ‘that some scratching type of discolouration upon the chest is a very easy mark for a man to produce on his own body.’ There were also the consistent and passionate denials of all six defendants ...”

“... something to be a fact, there is an entire apparatus at their disposal for proving it to be so: self-seeking accusers, suggestible or imaginative witnesses, broken suspects, the power to give credit to what supports the hypothesis and to rubbish what controverts it. Our adversarial system of criminal justice has a mass of safeguards against the technical ...”

“... well knowing that his personal clockwork was like that of nobody else. A black sheep redeeming him-self in history’s eye? A ‘little man on the make’? The chosen instrument of the God of Battles? Or just a very good professional soldier – touched intermittently by genius? This uncommonly readable book could have been trimmed of a few ...”

“... literature has really ‘come of age’ in the sense of being completely independent and self-reliant. My answer would be not quite, but nearly so. Its first writers were English, Scots or Irish transferred to alien shores and naturally looking to Great Britain for their audience. In this they were followed by the first generation of writers born in ...”

“... in a way which is pertinent to irony as preternatural vigilance, when he lets enter his engaging self. ‘The awkward dodging to left and to right when two people meet in the street’ was unmasked (unpersuasively, it seems) by Freud as erotic of purpose. ‘The last time I engaged in the act, the other person was a large policeman.’ So? But no. End of ...”

“... and ‘reality’, implying that they are self-evident absolutes which any ordinary person will take for granted. To make matters worse, he uses favoured terminology inconsistently (Stanley Fish claimed to find 17 different meanings for the word ‘division’ in Bayley’s book The Uses of ...”

“... or genocide were being committed. Unlike the EU and other regional bodies bound by economic self-interest, the AU was an exercise in sentiment and aspiration – the embodiment of an impulse towards unity. The high hopes of the independence years were revived, with judicious amnesia. At the founding OAU summit, the Togolese putschist Gnassingbé ...”

“... knew it who is disappearing. Those who are older than they are young make exaggeratedly impatient, self-deprecating jokes when they forget a name, a face or why it was they walked into a room. (Recent research from Notre Dame suggests that it may be passing through doorways which unframes the thought you had the second before – but I’ve just forgotten the ...”

“... in mining overseas. Jobs dismissed him to Isaacson as a ‘con man’, but their careers – from self-discovery to charismatic leadership to great wealth – bear out the similarities between them that friends noticed at Reed. Before the string of product hits that began in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he ...”