“... the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of ...”

“... the family with keeping the nobility at a distance; and he endorses a widely held view that a self-interested, obdurately entrenched nobility was the Achilles’ heel of the regime. The secret of Charlemagne’s success, however, was to mobilise family and elite at the same time, thereby securing their more or less harmonious coexistence within the ...”

“... great case for rationality, for the necessary and moral correction of error – think of Emma’s self-abasements when she realises how poorly she has read her world – while simultaneously undermining the grounds of that rationality by showing that the quest for transparency is in fact driven by cloudy desire. Is this a contradiction or a paradox? Can ...”

“... follow, more or less fabulously narrated; with light digressions, tense asides and much moody self-reflexiveness. The premise of The Double, Saramago’s most recently translated novel, is this: a man, a shy and gloomy history teacher, watches a video and catches sight of someone, an uncredited bit-part actor playing a hotel receptionist, who is identical ...”

“... ambivalent sort of independence, and so ended up alienating everyone. Legitimists accused him of self-interest, while the new government doubted his loyalty. He found himself socially ostracised and professionally stuck, working as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy. America provided a way out. Under the ...”

“... of leader it is because he has tapped a deep well of left-wing anti-liberalism. His combative and self-assured tone helps. A characteristic example of his provocative style is his claim, made after Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were being ‘hysterical’ when they saw Trump as a danger to democracy, since ...”

“... of other people’s pieties (sometimes even his own)! How wickedly good at puncturing the self-regard of the intelligentsia! What a master of black humour!! What a polemical style!! In the great tradition of the arch-polemicists Marx and Lenin, but used for their undoing!!! Solzhenitsyn was born in December 1918, a few months after his father died in ...”

“... present mood, your desire for and attempts at suicide, show more than anything else your loss of self-control … it’s not a question of you carrying out some wish or command of mine, but just in your stability, in a quiet, sensible relationship to life. And as long as you don’t have that, life with you is senseless for me. In the months before her ...”

“... in character that she should have found her settled artistic identity through an act of symbolic self-effacement, delegating the creative task to a proxy, a woman of much the same age, who, as it were, writes the story for her. Both The Wall, her most emotionally powerful book, and The Loft, her most intellectually sophisticated, make use of the same ...”

“... autobiography, for instance, he chose not to recount his life directly but to project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily ...”

“... have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out ...”

“... de la Correspondance, a private weekly showcase run by Mammès-Claude Pahin de la Blancherie, a self-aggrandising businessman who had a ‘tense’ relationship with the official arts administration. Showing under Pahin’s aegis guaranteed exposure but meant running the risk of having your paintings seized by his hungry creditors. The rise of the Royal ...”

“... enough to ensure that he never found the judgment of the scientific community transparent or self-evident. The idyll did not last. Some aspects of Polanyi’s vision of Berlin were naive and others were fragile. By 1930, some observers saw quite clearly what was wrong and what might soon happen. The delusion was that science was then the totally free and ...”

“... as about the ways in which an older person casts off and then re-creates and rewrites his younger self. This allows him a potentially ironised perspective on his earlier experiences while wistfully permitting the earlier intensities to glimmer through. So while Beaupuy and the young radical Wordsworth are passionately invoking a series of abstract nouns to ...”

“... our interest and the writer’s feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly ...”