“... of 1930-2 did he learn how to touch the heart as well as to shock and show off. The process of self-education went right on up to the great chapel at Ronchamp. That would be consonant with the picture which Brooks draws. What is clear from this Bildungsroman is that Le Corbusier’s point of departure in 1920 owes everything to a very slow and often ...”

“... that everyone, even the békés, actually spoke was included, it took the form of a condescending, self-alienating phonetics – the quaint mumbo-jumbo of the p’tit nègre. The novelists Maryse Cond and Simone Schwarz-Bart still write in standard French and look primarily to their African origins; their work is only faintly inflected by the postwar trend for ...”

“... on the mainland. Besides there is a strain of Chinese nationalism within Hong Kong society itself. Self-definitions are divided. The Hong Kong Transition Project, based at the Baptist University, has been testing public attitudes in the colony at regular intervals since February 1993. One of the responses it has charted is the answer to the question: ‘What ...”

“... account as the most obviously successful exemplar of fundamentalist polygyny. ‘Tall, handsome, self-assured, intelligent and articulate’, Harry manages his five wives, 65 children and over three hundred members of subsequent generations with a seemingly invariable mixture of sensitivity and firmness. Known to the entire family, including himself, as ...”

“... of a devastating intellectual challenge but because of a social shift of élite interest and self-definition. There was, to be sure, a serious intellectual critique of wonder, which Bacon sourly defined as ‘broken knowledge’. He himself and those he inspired remained interested in monsters and anomalies, but the rarity, remoteness, brevity and ...”

“... the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it seems that having a life is a matter for self-congratulation, and therefore the result of an individual’s character rather than merely the fact of existence and the effect of a series of random circumstances. Some lives are ‘life’ and some are not, but the precise nature of ‘a life’ is never ...”

“... that animals occupy’. Like Emerson and Thoreau, Lopez has a doctrine, a plan, an agenda for self-improvement. People, he writes, ‘must learn restraint’. In Arctic Dreams he refers to our ‘obligation’ to the land, our duty ‘to approach it with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try and sense the range and variety of its ...”

“... intervention by the scissors of anyone too sceptical to take this virtual enormity on trust.) The self-denying ordinance to which the members of the Oulipo are pledged has roots of a kind in Queneau’s own literary biography. For this was a man of secretive bent who had served his time when young among the Surrealists, but had then broken with ...”

“... must always be a matter of dispute. The selection of evidence itself can be a subtle form of self-censorship, but the sheer volume of new material he brings to light suggests that Ferguson was allowed to use anything and everything he found. The thirty chapters rest on a huge collection of archival material. I did a rough calculation for three chapters ...”

“... fulfilled ... the Dream and its dark side’. The dark side, too, of the old American gospel of self-reliance and action, especially as the Transcendentalists preached it. ‘Let us enter in the state of war and wake Thor and Woden,’ Emerson demanded. ‘Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.’ Consider Thoreau’s not-so-Green lament in ...”

“... genres of fantasy and children’s literature, in Lord of the Rings or Narnia – has a certain self-sufficient charm. We are given, in Gulliverian style, an entertaining little parody of theological dispute and heresy, as the blemmyae, the headless beings with eyes in their chests, debate the nature of the Incarnation. We are supposed to be thinking that ...”

“... rivals, France and Britain, but the Soviet Union, which was also a loose conglomerate of largely self-governing states, held precariously together by a number of factors of which force was perhaps the least important. The active collaboration of local elites, on which Kamen dwells at length, was clearly crucial, but there were other, more elusive cultural ...”

“... things get rapidly worse, she acquires – like Doctor Glas? – a series habit and a capacity for self-delusion, and he runs away to Copenhagen. Söderberg lived for almost another thirty years, but wrote no more fiction. He wrote about religion, his old bête noire, and history. Unlike Knut Hamsun, he opposed Fascism and Hitler. I like the description – I ...”

“... pornography, it often reads like it, but there is more to Platform than porn. Amid the cynicism, self-loathing and hermetic fucking, love emerges. It is hard to believe this could seem fresh: the story of a couple who start out interested in sex and end up loving each other is a familiar one in art and, indeed, life. Yet it does seem fresh. Perhaps this is ...”

“... to immigrants and prospective immigrants, and with what that reception shows about American self-perceptions and national identity. The discourse of American immigration serves him as a kind of proxy for a larger discourse about the American national character. In both the early and late 20th-century periods, King tells us, immigrants from unfamiliar ...”