“... cosmopolitan constitution’ and thus ‘towards perpetual peace’.Kant prefaced his essay with a self-deprecating joke, suggesting that ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ could have been the name of an inn, with a sign depicting a deserted churchyard – a resting place, perhaps, for ‘philosophers who dream a sweet dream of perpetual peace’. The joke wasn’t ...”

“... letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear that Lee is really talking to herself: I don’t know quite what to do for the best. Shut up and take the consequences, sit tight on the safety valve, ease things a little by small squeals that humiliate ...”

“... of unquarried marble and ‘plane-tree-dimmed. ... hill villages’. But Clampitt’s dry self-mockery usually manages to disinfect illusion. And in ‘Babel aboard the Hellas International Express’ she catches rather nicely the sprawling placelessness of travel, a fallen cosmopolitan gabble along the Songlines, as she rattles from Salonika ...”

“... of the English betrayal of Modernism, A Sinking Island doesn’t slow down to consider whether self-betrayal might not be more interesting and important than the other kind. At one moment Hugh Kenner, characteristically whisking all external phenomena into his pattern, says that in ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot ‘meets the shade of Yeats’. It’s true that ...”

“... for Gordimer, essentially a matter of representation. In the process, what she calls ‘creative self-absorption’ must always be checked by ‘conscionable awareness’. Coetzee, however, doubts that the sort of literal reflection offered by Gordimer and writers like her tells us anything more real, or more truthful, than a more obviously imaginative ...”

“... to it. When not staking his claim to Shakespeare he deliberately chose roles that reinforced his self-casting as a defiant, athletic personification of all-American patriotism. His favourites included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the ...”

“... of the younger fans who have edited them, that he is not more famous and better regarded. In a self-defeating introduction to the Reader, Arturo Silva indignantly sets out the neglect suffered by his hero: ignored by ‘editors and bureaucrats’, unrecognised by the academic establishment, forced five times to rewrite a profile of Kurosawa for the New ...”

“... former collaborators and intimates alike. Given access to notebooks which reveal ‘a staggering self-loathing and guilt’, Heilpern acknowledges that he is dealing with a man who threw his 16-year-old daughter out of his house, fired his secretary for being pregnant, wrote letters to Jill Bennett addressed to ‘Mrs Adolf Hitler, Pouffs’ Palace, 30 ...”

“... think about.’ It seems almost a triumph from her rapist’s point of view to have made this self-protective separation necessary. Rosa imagines him triumphant, certainly, not carrying a guilty burden but enjoying ‘the lightness, I imagine a lightness, it must be light to be without knowing you are being, walking being walking, all safe as it can ...”

“... Liberal peoples, who are naturally indifferent to imperial glory, can justly wage wars of self-defence on ‘outlaw’ states. The synergy between the aims of the US State Department, human rights advocates and military humanists grew more intense after 9/11. Philip Bobbitt, counsellor to several American administrations, and muse to Blair and ...”

“... determination. He sits on the left of the screen, irresolutely regarding her but full of apparent self-confidence, facing her as she stands on the right, tentative yet absolutely decided. She persuades, she confesses, she shows her strength in her willingness to surrender, and all he can do is agree that he loves her and yet feebly evade her. Her fervour ...”

“... Baker cites in his exhaustive biography is Wheatley’s own memoirs, and Wheatley was a relentless self-aggrandiser; but it sounds about right. In the mid-1960s, three decades into his career, he had 55 books in print, which collectively accounted for one seventh of Hutchinson’s turnover; Arrow, Hutchinson’s paperback imprint, was selling 1,150,000 ...”

“... as well – nurses, for example. There is a sense in which the Dubliners Bono and Bob Geldof are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. The English and Scottish Catholic churches have always relied heavily on Irish priests to minister to parishioners who were themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The ...”

“... outward performance, not inward essence. No doubt Swift was drawn to La Rochefoucauld’s view of self-love as central to human nature, and when presenting one of his best-known poems as ‘occasioned’ by the Maxims, picked a passage so cynical that La Rochefoucauld had purged it from his definitive edition of 1678. The epigraph to ‘Verses on the Death of ...”

“... a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic of her resilient self-belief – or defensive bluster, depending which way you read it. ‘Aut inveniam viam, aut faciam,’ she wrote on the flyleaf of all her diaries: ‘I will either find out a way, or make one.’ For a ‘creative writer’, university would have been ...”