“... come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements rarely compensate, often seeming more past than achievement. Even for ...”

“... wrote Lincoln Steffens. ‘She was large; she dressed as a large woman ... You felt ... her self-contentment and shared her self-composure, but, best of all, the prophetess gave you glimpses of what a Buddha can see by sitting still and quietly looking.’ This is the pattern of Stein’s extraordinary legend; she ...”

“... Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) presents, as White says in The Burning Library, ‘a gay hero so self-hating that even the most retrograde reader would become impatient with his inner torment and welcome with relief the Stonewall Uprising, which is the concluding scene in the novel’. The Farewell Symphony starts in 1994, and loops back into the early ...”

“... made life digestible for me. You re-invigorated me, like a tonic bath. When I was groaning with self-pity, feeling all alone, I used to say to myself: ‘Look at him’ and I would get back to work with renewed energy, You were my supreme moral emblem, and my perpetual edification. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 November 1852: Bouilhet and I, we ...”

“... for words which sound like the squelching of a leaky boot, raises this doctrine to the point of self-parody. In poetry like Heaney’s, you can hear the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their referents, whereas Donald Davie’s words stand at a chaster distance from his meanings. This, needless to say, is linguistic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 think of Hardy as a contemporary of Eliot and Pound, a rooted but cosmopolitan writer, a self-taught craftsman and a poet. One of the best chapters is his discussion of Hardy the ‘laureate of engineering’, in which he suggests that technology, far from being something Hardy escaped, was a force he allowed to shape his aesthetic. Davie, like Pound ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”