“... 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 ...”

“... This theory is a step towards the right answer, but taken alone it is absurd. Joyce was a self-important man, as he needed to be, and he had described Stephen in a book title as a portrait of himself when young: he would not trivialise the character without warning, in a continuation. Actually, the book confronts Stephen with a grim necessity: for a ...”

“... Wagner transcriptions on the piano to drown his despair); Frau Tuzzi’s self-deluded love for the Prussian financier and polymath Paul Arnheim; the poet Feuermaul’s flatulentverse. But the ferocity of these attacks argues for the importance of what is being defended. The experience of soul is made central to Ulrich’s intellectual ...”

“... and failures, Jenkins carried the burden of embodying the centre-left’s idea of its best self, the emblem for all those hopes that politics might be a bit more rational and enlightened and, well, agreeable than it actually is. He appeared to meet several of the job specifications for the role of social-democratic philosopher-king. And his own ...”

“... oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and self-constructed. The land was purchased in 1966, after Snyder returned to California following periods as a Zen Buddhist monk in Kyoto, in the engine room of an oil tanker, travelling through India with his ...”

“... of the actual economy. The result is liberating in its overturning of a simplistic faith in the self-regulating perfection of free trade or flexible markets, but it also creates an opportunity for heterodox economists and disreputable policy entrepreneurs. Upholding the rigour and status of proper economics thus requires vigilant policing. Summers, for ...”

“... implications for contemporary poetry, given that so many once silent groups now clamour for self-representation. When an Irish woman attempts to rewrite the inherited poem, Boland argues, she has to square the circle of authoring a structure in which she tacitly appears as an object, an appropriated emblem. Many of the finest pieces in her Collected ...”

“... newspaper pundits have created persistent legends; and it is to combat one of these legends that Robert Ferrell has edited Eisenhower’s diaries. Professor Ferrell is not the first historian who has sought to show that the General-President, far from being a confused nonentity, was, on the contrary, a hard-working, shrewd and purposive leader who ...”

“... the question. They assume, surely correctly, that it is a genuine puzzle. There is nothing either self-explanatory or standard about the survival of a united kingdom based on England, from Early Modern times until practically the end of the second millennium. John Robertson’s collection of academic studies examines the origins of the Union’s most ...”

“... victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough ...”

“... 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 ...”