“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... past can be eradicated. What he can’t see is that this wishful thinking is precisely the kind of self-delusion that he takes to be characteristic of religion. That’s because it is a kind of religion. In his yearning for certainty, Christopher is merely replicating the intolerance and taste for indoctrination that he professes to despise among the ...”

“... look filled me with longing.The little girl in the picture became my secret sister, my other self, the pretty child I was – inside – in spite of my stout and clumsy outside and, at times, my ugly convict skull (the remedy for lice was shaving the head). Like many children, I was a changeling – not the right shape or temperament to belong to my ...”

“... against exploitation’, were ‘our allies in the struggle for a new society’ and must be given self-government at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the war itself was ‘part of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV series, sees ...”

“... utterance, with the tiniest flicker of an eyelid or the slightest suggestion of a thought – a self-regard and obsession with the self usually only available to religious novitiates, madmen or very young children. Fame, with all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to ...”