“... the apparent enthusiasm among some early Christian women for asceticism, sexual renunciation and self-starvation? One favoured scholarly answer stresses the liberating possibilities of early Christian communities. Christian asceticism enabled women to (re)gain control over their own bodies and find an escape route from the patriarchal authority which ...”

“... to haunt her.’ Much of Barker’s fiction is involved with that attempted exorcism. This self-reflectiveness carried with it the hazard of repetition, and Regeneration, published in 1991, consciously broke a compulsive pattern. It was a historical novel, based on the work of the Army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and ...”

“... a book, an autobiography, but these successes would be scoffed at by true-blue Balliol men. His self-belief was self-made, artificial. Theirs was ingrained, time-honoured. ‘I walked through Balliol in a daze, haunted by the thought that I was going to be part of a college that was nearly seven hundred years old. Seven ...”

“... did. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive drinker. He reported to the poet Georges Rodenbach that he would never forget ‘the wet, soggy sound made by the removal of the death-mask from his face, an operation in which part of his beard and mouth had come away too’. After the ...”

“... caution, which proceeds from a quite reasonable assumption that the ordinary reader doesn’t like self-admiring mucking around with language. It is a little less difficult to forgive the persistent, bogus anti-intellectualism. ‘Less’ here means more. Taylor seems at times to forget what he is saying. The book goes mattering on in the vein of the ...”

“... wanted more: in several remarkable passages scattered across this journal at once perceptive and self-serving, he gives vent to his long-standing resentment against what he chose to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of ...”

“... when it is attached to an interesting personal history. Of late, however, with his growing self-assurance, Brodsky has dared to dispense with these privileges, and in the course of the past decade has been writing poems in English that demand to be judged purely on their own merits. I assume that these are the poems on which Hofmann bases his high ...”

“... institutions and social change. Rational Choice theory presents us with instrumentally rational, self-interested agents. It sounds as if such individuals, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, will never contribute to the common weal unless they gain more than they pay. Indeed, since each calculates in terms of his marginal costs and his ...”

“... The traditional self-contained, sensibly-proportioned novel, still very much the dominant influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey Harrison, with ostensibly the second (although in fact the first) volume of what looks set to become a monumental tetralogy, puts pressure on the boundaries of the form by insisting that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail ...”

“... modern guru, in spite of his occultism, in that what he offered was not simple salvation, but a self, that 20th-century Grail. Ignore your ‘personality’, be taught and find your real self. His most famous follower (though not for long), Katherine Mansfield, wrote when she joined his community shortly before her ...”

“... the ways in which a particular age imagines the Neanderthals is a guide to the forms of human self-delusion in vogue at any given moment. This is the theme that preoccupies Eric Trinkaus and Pat Shipman in their account of how the image of the Neanderthals has evolved over the years since their discovery. The Neandertals is thoroughly readable, in the ...”

“... according to Lonsdale, for the moral agency that legitimises or at any rate sponsors maturity and self-respect, in line with Kikuyu ancestral concepts of the difference between good and evil, between success and failure, eventually between life and death. On the internal evidence, to which Lonsdale is an indispensable guide, this moral compulsion – perhaps ...”

“... cumbrously/flashily/winsomely, one should use craft and expertise to overthrow the stiflement and self-importance of craft and expertise – to be as uninhibited and fresh and airy as a beginner. Not continue to paint yourself into a corner with aching brush and paint gone hard, but take a line for a walk, as Tom Paulin says, taking a leaf from Paul ...”

“... not so much Omar’s original, to which he was introduced by his great friend Cowell, a brilliant self-taught linguist, but Tennyson’s In Memoriam. FitzGerald’s relations with Tennyson were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his ...”

“... between fables, exempla, fairy-tales, jocular tales, nouvelles and nursery tales. Intolerant of self-indulgence (she doesn’t believe in fairies) and Peter Pannery, Dr Briggs investigates folklore in Shakespeare as a musicologist would examine folk-song in Vaughan Williams. She is not concerned to tell children stories, but in Abbey Lubbers, Banshees and ...”