“... that correspond to the signals received through the senses – and, I would add, that lead to self-consistency in the signal-processing that occurs in the network. The principal evidence here seems to be that the maturing of individuals is accompanied by the regression of the number of synapses. It appears that the genes allow an exuberance in the number ...”

“... a subtle ear. If Housman had been able to effect a junction between his poetic and his critical self, if like the mutinous Ned in one of his finest poems – how characteristic that when he submitted Last Poems to J.W. Mackail for criticism, ‘Hell Gate’ should have been the one he had most doubts about! – he had found the courage to shoot the ...”

“... First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within the terms of the old, 19th-century polity. In contrast to those of Germany, Italy and France, however, it was overcome; and it was overcome by buying the working class off. The forms of the ...”

“... in practice, of international capital’. Small is beautiful, especially in the form of ‘popular self-management’. As in Politics and Letters, Williams thinks that you could start with the kind of democracy ‘previously imagined only for very small communities’, and then use the new electronic technologies of communication in administering larger ...”

“... ideal, inscribed on his temple (from which Socrates, outwardly a satyr, adopted it), was self-knowledge, and Dante began the Paradiso with a prayer to him: ‘Enter my breast and infuse me with your spirit, as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs.’ Plato said that the strains of the pipes, which he excluded from the ...”

“... Trinidad, he records, that helped him become a writer, by sending him to England: but it was self-governing Trinidad that sent him on ‘a colonial tour in 1960 – and by this accident I became a traveller.’ Much of his fiction and travel writing reflects a strong interest in the question of where he – and people in like case, colonials or ...”

“... right to innocence, to a pure appreciation of life’s pleasures.’ And this is not mere showbiz self-pity. Does it seem preposterous that the evil, profligate dwarf should regret his ‘right to innocence’? The granting of that right to his audiences, precisely amid scenes of vice and horror, has been Polanski’s special ...”

“... end in flattish idiom). As in Enzensberger, an Eliotic note is struck, combining Prufrockian self-depreciation and the Hollow Men’s sense of an ending. But the poem is not mannered in the way this might suggest, and its feeling is well-described in Johnston’s own words: ‘Like Paulinus, I register the end of Empire without expressing either joy or ...”

“... of the Greek romance; it would be difficult to establish, in a style which always verges on self-parody. Allegory looks more promising. The idea is not new. The Byzantines justified their reading of the amorous Heliodorus by making him a bishop and his book a history of the soul’s search for god. The Elizabethans took the same view of the louche and ...”

“... it clear just how much Colin and Mary invited their doom (even, in the brutally superstitious and self-protecting phrase of modern city-life, ‘asked for it’), one answer would be that it is of the nature of tragedy that it will not abide this question. ‘We didn’t exactly plan to come, but it wasn’t completely accidental either.’ Did King Lear ...”

“... reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior.’ He was always free of self-doubt. Seeing photographs of him in his smock (he was against trousers but sometimes wore loose drawers underneath the smock), stalwart and bearded, it is easy to think of him as a Medieval master-craftsman. The Catholic convert accepted the authority of ...”

“... you grow used to them,’ he says, ‘Titian’s three spaces come to seem like three systems of self locked within a single head, almost as if they were the three faces of Eve.’ But the decoding has only just begun. A page later: ‘Catching your breath, you realise that Titian is making you think – much as you might be forced to think about the ...”

“... cultural stereotypes of a stagnant Occitan economy did not admit access to sudden wealth, or men self-made by licit, natural means. It is worth recalling that the same rules hold for fairy-tales, where flax is spun, harvests are mowed and forests levelled, not by human effort, whose range is recognized as sadly limited, but by supernatural intervention. Le ...”

“... of which you would see a great deal more at any Rugby League match – but the players’ self-consciousness. In this example, as in most RPGs, the central motif is combat, and the players choose aggressive roles from a limited and stereotyping repertoire (after all, there must have been little skinny barbarians and slow subtle ones as well as the ...”

“... Karl Polanyi, debates with whom have a central place in the volume. Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market economy had emerged only recently in world history, in the course of the ‘Great Transformation’, as he called it, of the 19th century. Braudel, on the other hand, suggests that a market economy can be found co-existing with a non-market ...”