Pluralism and the Personality of the State 
by David Runciman.
Cambridge, 279 pp., £35, June 1997, 0 521 55191 9
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... for enlarged state provision in all Western countries are now increasingly framed in terms, not of self-realisation and higher ends, but of consumer satisfactions and individualised private rights. A rather different range of binary contrasts, but one that similarly links timeless questions of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional ...

Sacred Geography

Raghu Karnad: Savarkar’s Nationalism, 23 January 2025

Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva 
by Janaki Bakhle.
Princeton, 501 pp., £38, April 2024, 978 0 691 25036 6
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... with days in fetters, weeks in solitary confinement or the whip. These years were crucial to his self-mythology; the most famous image of him on the islands depicts him in chains, forced to turn a heavy oil press in the sun. This is the picture on the cover of the ‘Veer Savarkar’ edition of the popular children’s comic Amar Chitra Katha, published in ...

Brag and Humblebrag

Maureen N. McLane: Walt Whitman’s Encounters, 22 May 2025

Specimen Days 
by Walt Whitman, edited by Max Cavitch.
Oxford, 336 pp., £8.99, September 2023, 978 0 19 886138 6
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... confessions’ which are not – non-spoiler alert – particularly confessional. A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, he announces in the first pages: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.’Born to a working-class family, Whitman fashioned ...

Bejesuited

Malcolm Gaskill: America’s First Catholics, 4 December 2025

A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America 
by Susan Juster.
North Carolina, 310 pp., £39.99, June, 978 1 4696 8622 6
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... William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one another.Among the ...

The Oracle of the Drowned

Douglas Oliver, 4 February 1988

... in our minds such corrupt purity, never escaping but sinking into not the unthinkable gift of the self to death, not the sea flash flood in the throat, but into the oracle of the drowned; because the oracle of the dying comes to a halt but the oracle of the dead continues and has humour in it. We ask the dying, ‘How do you go about drowning?’ and the ...

Sticking to the text

Peter Porter, 2 May 1985

... Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray another word In this sodality, self-repressing and male, And we discover, hardly believing our eyes And ears, a sort of chromatic scale, That whatever lives and feels is logos. Tell us then, vanity, what is truth And how does it differ from honesty? Ecclesiastics and analysts play sleuth To ...

Mother of Nature

Diane Williams, 4 November 2021

... go back home. Dad is so mean. There shouldn’t be a reason. Could there be a speck of my original self anywhere? – that I have left behind. God, and if I have forgotten about it, can it save ...

Two Poems

Nick Laird, 18 November 2004

... Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas. Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of the disciples, and forgone a life on the quest for the rest. And a good book. Or a decent cause. fear Laird Jnr was a tyke, a terrier. A nit-picker who grew to a hair-splitter, he was not so much scared of his shadow, as of its ...

McGahern’s Ireland

D.J. Enright, 8 November 1979

The Pornographer 
by John McGahern.
Faber, 252 pp., £4.95
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... and reassert ourselves, rejecting those foreign bodies as we sharpen and restore our sense of self’. But perhaps the sense of self is never sufficient, the roles never so secure as with Mavis and the Colonel. Perhaps what is missing is simply religious faith – which the Irish, always having had more of, always miss ...

Pretending to write ‘Vile Bodies’

Christopher Hitchens, 9 January 1992

Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy 
by Ben Sonnenberg.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 571 16545 1
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... Idly turning over the stacks, I unguardedly exclaimed: ‘Golly. A whole big thing on Jewish self-hatred,’ ‘And that’s only volume one!’ he returned, fighting to control the look of wolfish conceit at such an easy score. I cursed inwardly. And now here is my revenge, ready to hand. In Lost Property, Ben does his best to get his truest friends to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Bette Davis, 12 August 2021

... unloving wife because of their damaged youngest daughter. Davis meets the girl, an echo of her old self, when she returns to Jaquith’s facility, and effectively adopts her. This makes her Henreid’s wife in spirit without his getting a divorce. This is what she means by their having the stars. Henreid isn’t thrilled but knows he mustn’t argue. Davis ...

Alphabetophile

Michael Hofmann: Eley Williams, 7 September 2017

Attrib. and Other Stories 
by Eley Williams.
Influx, 169 pp., £9.99, March 2017, 978 1 910312 16 2
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Frit 
by Eley Williams.
Sad, 35 pp., £6, April 2017
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... mind is almost its own subject, where the place of narrative or character is mostly taken by the self-conscious or self-delighting mind, and where you yourself are put in mind of the quivery automatic graph-paper machines that register earthquakes or the humidity in museums (seismometers or hygrometers), is demanding to ...

At Tate Modern

James Attlee: ‘Picasso 1932’, 5 July 2018

... of the hang exactly as he arranged it in 1932. The bearded, pale, emaciated young artist in a self-portrait of 1901 looks down on a selection of portraits of his family: his future wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in a painting from 1917, surrounded by images of their son, Paul, from the 1920s. On the opposite wall, three works hung together ...

Short Cuts

Paul Myerscough: Zidane at work, 5 October 2006

... interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other. Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘An Autumn Afternoon’, 22 May 2014

An Autumn Afternoon 
directed by Yasujirō Ozu.
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... he has not remarried and his daughter is now merely the old maid who puts up with his drunken self-pity and barked commands. Our hero, Hirayama, played by Chishû Ryû, is being nagged by his friend to avoid this fate, and above all avoid this fate for his daughter; and he does, but he takes a long time to come to his decision, he doesn’t have any ...