“... wistful conservatism                             an immense load Of self-neutralising moral and social qualities, Above all, Circumspection. That assault on the ‘English ethos’ comes from one of its most vehement and defiant opponents, Hugh MacDiarmid. In the preface to his last published collection, Direadh (1974), he ...”

“... dir.’ As in most elegies, not least those in which men elegise their lovers, there is something self-regarding here. We learn considerably less about the dead woman than we learn about Douglas Dunn’s dead wife in his 1985 Elegies. Some readers may find it odd that the poem ends with the dead woman comforting the grieving husband; except that the German ...”

“... collection of ‘Blue Labour’ thinking is as follows: ‘The Liberal-led coalition government, self-consciously progressive in orientation, while appropriating Labour’s language of mutual and co-operative practice, asks a fundamental question as to what distinctive gifts Labour could bring to this party.’ Not just a coalition, not just a coalition ...”

“... Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a shrewd entrepreneur who became rich through trade and banking, was a self-made man given to scoffing at public opinion. Where Aixois notables read Le Mémorial d’Aix, a local paper that reflected their deep-dyed conservatism, Louis-Auguste professed liberal views and subscribed to L’Evénement, the paper for which Zola wrote ...”

“... an unprepossessing child and the elaborate carapace of later years shielded a permanently bruised self-image. In her fifties, while being fêted on a tour in America, she remarked to an acquaintance: ‘I can’t stand myself. I’m so ugly.’ Her father’s attempts to improve her looks with back braces, nose pegs and a strict regime that prevented her from ...”

“... many glasses of water. Even in the most apparently convivial of circumstances, Hastings maintained self-control, the root of the considerable personal authority which he was to exercise from his days at Westminster on (he had been a serious boy, and became Captain of the school in 1749). Westminster connections were important to Hastings, in one case damningly ...”

“... just like their characters in the film. Husbands may be taken as an auto-critique; it is also a self-indulgence. Ray Carney has been the keeper of the Cassavetes flame in the American academy. He thinks Cassavetes is the greatest and sees himself as the only one saying it. So he shouts it, he grabs you by the lapels and insists that you hear it. He ...”

“... and blindly worshipful’, but he was shrewdly advised by his general editor, Ernest Rhys, another self-made man of letters, and between them they correctly judged the deferential seriousness of their potential market. Rose finds it both understandable and impressive that ‘Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George ...”

“... impulse moved them, that they were chasing a glimpse, however fleeting, of some confirming, self-ratifying idea of beauty, an equation to transcend all equations: some sense of perfect rightness, a feeling of the universe clicking into place. We can clearly see the romantic impulse at work, but when it is expressed through mathematics, most of us are ...”

“... John Myers, who was described by James Merrill as ‘an ageless, hulking Irishman with the self-image of a pixie’. They certainly didn’t consider themselves a ‘school’, but they were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane ...”

“... Iran might be ‘perverted into a weapon aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem’. There were some journalists, however, who were genuinely reflective. H.D.S. Greenway acknowledged in the Boston Globe on 21 January that ‘there was damage done to US interests by the American obsession with the hostage crisis to the exclusion of ...”

“... the implied contrast with an imagined ‘real’ intelligentsia has a long history in British self-definition. But even if any relatively distinctive pattern could be established here (scholarship on intellectuals in other European countries suggests no great distinctiveness is involved), there is no way to ‘read off’ political or other convictions ...”

“... The Elvis bazaar is surely the low parody of Lourdes. To the images of sickness and suffering and self-sacrifice, the proprietors of the Elvis pilgrimage add a frank and frantic sexuality. The ambiguity of ‘passion’, long suspected in icons like Bernini’s Santa Teresa, here finally bursts forth and goes to town (Memphis). The nuns of Elvis spend their ...”

“... this sensible way. Certainly, this is very different from Wittgenstein’s cautious argument that self-consciousness depends on consciousness of others, both expressed in a common language. But O’Shaughnessy is not trying to prove anything at this point. He simply wants to liberate his inquiry from the new scepticism about the internal world, and ...”

“... for the need to be recognised or honoured; when what at first was the joy of creation and self-realisation turns into an affliction; when, in Africa especially, the vocation of writing takes its revenge on those who have tasted the thrill of representing the drama of a vast, unwieldy and refractory continent – a drama of becoming. Chinua Achebe has ...”