Search Results

“... there is the work of complexity theorists, who argue that there are rich seams of non-programmed, self-organising and self-assembling order in the natural world that offer natural selection a helping hand by generating complex patterns without the intervention of genes. Evolution, from this perspective, is driven by an ...”

“... checks and balances of the Constitution in order to overcome the traditional fate of republican self-government. Throughout history, republics had been sustained – but only for so long – by the virtuous self-rule of their citizens; inevitably, patriotic commitment to the polis waned with the coming of luxury, which ...”

“... Wallace’s call for a more feelingful brand of postmodernism, though in different ways. Funny, self-deprecating and extremely clever in his journalism and essays,* Wallace in his fiction occasionally barricades his interest in ‘plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions’ behind uncompromising levels of reader-unfriendliness. Franzen, as he tells it ...”

“... that has concerned me for decades. By the way, the last two sentences of that paragraph – a bit self-satisfied, blasé, easy-going despite the subject matter – could have been lifted, stylistically speaking, from either of the two novels, whose breezy, matter of fact ‘sanity’ about women who are complete wrecks and/or evil has none of the swish ...”

“... empire thinks itself superior, deserving or generous (or all three at once); but Adams saw that self-deception as well as cruelty was a danger of ‘all the wars of interest and intrigue’ (he means all wars except those of immediate self-preservation or rebellion against despotism). Wars generally are driven by ...”

“... stamp of control in miles and miles of empty moorland’, to construct ‘a little block of self in the world’. A nicely written early passage shows him studying a kitchen that, although his own, has now become a stranger’s: I noticed little lived-in things. The limescale on the kettle, the half-used bottle of washing-up liquid. The couple of ...”

“... as these can be, memoirs furnish a treacherous resource to the historian. Reminiscences can be self-serving, vengeful, and distorted by faulty memory, selective amnesia, wishful thinking and exaggeration. They can be rife with gossip and rumour. The temptation to recast the past to suit the present . . . can be hard to resist. In any case, factual ...”

“... World War Two. The science of cybernetics concerns itself with the principles of organisation and self-organisation. Complex, highly interconnected network structures exhibit exactly the kind of robustness found in biological systems. This is particularly the case in embryonic development, which Keller likens to a ‘videotape that displays countless ...”

“... of his own literary strengths and weaknesses: I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant. The values structuring a critical work must be either impersonal or strange; the individuality of the critic, except emotionally, is to be nullified. Such ...”

“... to a dialectic between such ‘top-down’ principles and less well understood ‘bottom-up’ self-organisation emerging from the life of the city itself. That the workings of a system as complex as a city might be computable stretches the limits of credulity. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of mudlarks by the river’s edge, or the ...”

“... mother’, and for his insistence that to exact compliance from the child is to create a False Self and inhibit the development of a True one. ‘Good-enough’ sounds placid and conciliatory, but it is a rather stern requirement. The child must have the conditions for ‘going-on-being’, and providing them is a delicate matter. The reward for success is ...”

“... throwback to another age. He explains how, in the late 19th century, history created its own self-serving niche by giving priority to the study of written documents over other traces of the past: primarily, the artefacts that became the stuff of prehistoric archaeology. This allowed historians to cling to a biblical orthodoxy about the deep past, and to ...”

“... in a new arrangement. Even as events seemed to tip the balance decisively in favour of national self-determination and a clean break – the Algerian war (from 1954), French withdrawal from Vietnam (1954), the independence of Morocco and Tunisia (1956), and Ghanaian independence (1957) – Senghor insisted that federation with France was essential for ...”

“... Platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have a similar effect on the presentation of the self, where the goal is to win plaudits for instantly impressive slogans and iconography. Chunks of ‘content’ – images, screengrabs of text, short snatches of video – circulate according to the number of thumbs up or thumbs down they receive.It is easy to ...”

“... The impression, as the orders arrive one after another, nearly a hundred of them so far, is of a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of authoritarian power. The effect on many has been to induce a sense of disorientation and terror; they wonder when, or whether, it will stop. Some wave the orders away, stressing ...”