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“... claims, Styron’s novel stages ‘a massive – and daringly modernist – project of racial self-transcendence’. How ‘daringly modernist’ is this project, given that, in 1773, John Bicknell and Thomas Day published a first-person poem called The Dying Negro, based on a newspaper account about a slave who shot himself rather than be sent to the ...”

“... interviewees, a vivid picture emerges of the parsonage and its inhabitants: the literary (self-described) eccentric, Patrick, working on his sermons, agitating for local causes and eating his meals alone. Aunt Branwell – Elizabeth Branwell – who came to care for the children after the death of their mother, her sister Maria, and is remembered for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... milky voice Of course I’ll wake you up when he comes; and then his eyelids close, and in his self-created darkness he is following a big car on a motorway at night, it turns into the driveway to the house, and presently the driver gets out: it is only a bear in the moonlight, walking on the lavender ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Motion is not a condition but a desire to be outside of one’s self and all desire must be swept away so saith fatso Gautama bus-like under the shade of some shrub in the Deer Park in some grove some municipal greensward chewing a leaf that has left him stoned as a stone stone-like mouthing this sententious drivel some errand-boy some rich man’s son dutifully sets down on a dusty tablet ignoring the insects and snakes After midnight under the arc-lights like a giant sound stage the abandoned set of an action spectacular Mrs Kiniski’s team goes bus to bus hoovering candy-wrappers crumbs and then with their scrapers attending to the grease and impacted filth and gum as Rudolfo sluices away in the south-east corner and the boss, with a sigh comes to the end of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha Phalanx upon phalanx of impassive Buddha-wagons silver hulls and red trim Fleet of the Three Jewels the Attainment & Perfection City Transit Corp ...”

“... not hopelessly lost) educative, retrievable, and involves the necessary destruction of a false self – in this case, the self that is not yet close to God, not yet shepherded in. Breakdown is purposive, has a language that is coherent (for those with the ears to hear), and is nothing less than a sign of the operation of ...”

“... of a Galsworthy or a Wells, though these novelists would have allowed their narrators a greater self-awareness than ever comes Hugh Gordon’s way. He has spent his time since leaving Oxford working in London for the Third World causes championed by his incongruously left-wing wife, and after the double failure of his marriage and his return to Starne he ...”

“... gaze, never to be seen again. Specifically, the party introduces three ‘highly-selected’ and self-made women – all contemporaries at Cambridge in the early Fifties and now middle-aged. One, Alix Bowen, wants to ‘change things’. An evangelical Leavisite, she teaches English to prisoners. Alix buries herself in Northam ‘that figurative Northern ...”

“... preternaturally young, were waved in unison in front of platforms where his current 70-year old self, the black hair turned white and the face turned wrinkled, was appearing in person. The news was his news: if Ceausescu visited a chicken farm, it took precedence over everything else. On the day of the Armenian earthquake Romanian Television led on a ...”

“... Copper once put it, ‘the Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one day the swift evolution from Desert Shield through Imminent Thunder to Desert Storm will make a great ...”

“... or subconsciously copied, from his father. There is certainly a streak of valetudinarianism in the self-portrait that emerges almost reluctantly from these generally buttoned-up but sometimes, by contrast, disquietingly confidential pages. It is hard to believe that this is the younger brother of Klaus and Erika Mann, the most way-out of Germany’s ...”

“... who are unhappy but not depressed (‘dysthymics’ in the esoteric language of psychiatry) great self-confidence and the ability to accept rejection without being upset. He supports this claim with a series of case-histories drawn from his own patients. Unfortunately psychiatric case-histories are a modern form of fairy story, whose fallibility is well ...”

“... revolting memories to surge up before my closed eyes, almost burning the closed lids with fiery self-disgust, did I kill a moral nerve? To flinch from such memories, simply suppress them, might have been healthier. Is it right to overcome self-disgust? Well, in any case I learned the trick of it. Nobody told me; I found ...”

“... contributed to their rapid impoverishment. Political activity began with the evolution of economic self-help schemes organised on a communal basis and was hastened by the Jews’ need to defend themselves against the anti-semitic violence accompanying Tsarist repression of liberalism (which culminated in the pogroms of the early 1880s and those following the ...”