“... words as exact as those of the stones in the tower itself. Auden had a beady eye for the laxity of self-indulgence, even when, as occurs in Hardy’s poems, it is a part of their personal engagingness. ‘I never cared for life: life cared for me,’ writes Hardy, and Auden commented: ‘What – never? Come, come, Mr Hardy.’ The line of poetry and the ...”

“... Smollett can often have been rated an enemy in the new age. ‘I want Smollet’s works,’ wrote Robert Burns, ‘for the sake of his incomparable humor.’1 And he may also have wanted them for their romantic intervals. Smollett was, in fact, to imitate the inimitable Cervantes for the rest of his life. He translated him, then re-translated him in a ...”

“... the matter of making money, the new monopolists and bureaucrats have shed embarrassment, shame and self-discipline. Everyone knows about ‘fat cats’ but few identify two recent sources of their fat – both innovations of the Thatcher years. The first is the ‘remuneration committee’, made up of non-executive directors, which, usually with the help of ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... however, seems dispiriting rather than scintillating – dispiriting because it is a chronicle of self-indulgence and sometimes callousness, dispiriting all the more because it is being repeated. It could, to be sure, have been a little less depressing. MacCarthy readily misses opportunities to doubt any of his wife Annabella’s accusations and insinuations ...”

“... than anything I could achieve at school with words. There were no excuses, no justifications, no self-deprecations: it was less equivocal, more final. I took for a while to reading about chess, along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a ...”

“... of constitutional meaning are as old and as august as the founding itself. And the theoretical self-consciousness Scalia brings to the table is a 20th-century phenomenon. In fact, he often sounds like a comparative literature student c.1983. He says it’s a ‘sad commentary’ that ‘American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most’ and ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... early religious feeling made him ‘rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. Spark’s heroine loves the passage, but also feels ‘a revulsion against an awful madness I then discerned in it’. That awful madness within the love of God, and the correspondingly awful madness that potentially ...”

“... the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight ...”

“... of distinct ideological and quasi-religious purpose, more aware of his limitations and his lack of self-confidence than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius ...”

“... honest to yourself about yourself is good for you – which is I suppose what all narratives about self-realisation must be about. By contrast The Magician, which is not about coming out but about staying firmly in, occupies a much more complicated and neurotic world, in which Mann’s negation of his homosexual feelings is admittedly a kind of moral failure ...”

“... to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ Ford told this story several times in several different ways, each time effacing ...”

“... to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue poet François Villon, imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1462; on the last float, the heroines from Jacques Rivette’s 1981 movie, Le Pont du Nord, are waving goodbye, along with the two keynote ...”

“... discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade Reimagined, due soon, will be another phase of his unstoppable campaign. Unger speaks primarily about the left and what it should do, but the old right finds itself in a ...”