“... fundamentally negative in character. In recent times, of course, it has been borrowed as a proud self-identification by those seeking to revive ancient religion. Nevertheless a censorious but conscientious clergyman might feel theological difficulties in speaking of ‘pagans’. Could he condemn as pagans those of his parishioners who obstinately cherished ...”

“... as though obligatorily with what was by now Byron’s literary signature, his morose and tormented self-projection as the poem’s ‘hero’. But the context is contemporary Europe, pacified and carved up by the victorious Allies after the collapse of the Napoleonic empire. Against the backdrop of this new conservative dispensation, the motifs of Childe ...”

“... and Common Sense’ and ‘On Depth and Superficiality’’ and the demolition of the theory of self-interest and identity in the Principles of Human Action. But that is the best-kept secret about Hazlitt: he is a hard thinker, with an intricacy not imposed by the usual stratagems – officious jargon, protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic ...”

“... at ease in the world of modern research. He laments the imprisonment of historical study within self-enclosed and necessarily un-comparative specialisms. Because historical study can never be ‘value-free’, he is on distant terms with the moral agnosticism, or moral abstention, of the doctoral belt. Because historical study can only have worth, and ...”

“... are virtual transcriptions (with a Nietzschean accent) of words of Emerson’s. In Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ there is a pair of sentences I have previously had occasion variously to cite and interpret: ‘The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.’ I will merely assert here that Emerson ...”

“... interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand the limits of association a society takes for granted, and by doing so extend the possibilities of reform, and their commentator ...”

“... so was he piqued by Heaney’s habit of characterising what he admired in others in self-descriptive terms? Or did ‘dividend from ourselves’ and ‘high yields’ trigger resentment at Heaney’s financial security, now that his Nobel Prize ‘doubloons’, as he called them, had been invested? Mahon’s jibe looks worse because the Letters ...”

“... it never quite works. Actors helplessly act – whereas the Sonnets have a certain autonomy and self-containment that is also expressive and outgoing. These are poems at once so inward as to be enigmas for editors, yet so entirely realised as to be available to any reader who wants to experience them. Since they are so various, covering many moods and many ...”

“... publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in the earlier books, particularly the father’s death in Book 1. Actually, if you want to begin here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first.Q. Is this fiction or ...”

“... she was ‘Jeanette Winterson’, the outsider who gatecrashed the canon, or alternatively the self-sabotaging golden girl and egomaniac who could never match that first success. When I met Jeanette she was working as the women’s editor at Brilliance Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near ...”

“... O’Neill lamented his lack of a great language adequate to his tragic subject: ‘By way of self-consolation, I don’t think, from the evidence of all that is being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time.’ ‘Our time’ is perhaps not just the 20th century, but the ...”

“... glossed over. No doubt Barney herself did much to prompt the prevailing euphoria. She was a born self-publicist and mythomane: a seductress of astonishing (and candid) appetites, the self-appointed doyenne of ‘Greek’ loves, a blowsy, billowy, impossibly garrulous cheerleader for la vie sapphique. (‘I want to be the ...”

“... Howard Marks has become his own ghost. Hallucination recollected in tranquillity. The older self, unaffected by years of fiddling with Rizla papers, warming resinous lumps, feeding on curls of aromatic smoke, looks back; invigilates the past. Visible breath clouding the window. Indulgently, the biographer taps the keys, takes down the story. A life ...”

“... with the regular and not excessive marching speed of the universe explain his buying one of those self-winders: he was a busy man and couldn’t afford the soft unclear evaporation of minutes, a day or two a year. The busy man winds his watch on as he drives, writes a prescription, taps a sweating back. But later, sitting for hours rehearsing from his ...”

“... False Spring A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away. * All night, the industry of erasure, effacement, our one mouth working itself dry. * But even a god can’t stop the light that finds us, annealed, fruitless, two strangers broken on the field of day ...”