“... age without reservation’; for the audience, ‘specifically aesthetic experience’ requires ‘self-abandonment to artworks’. As for the substance of history disclosed by true art, it is little short of agony. Adorno meant to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, and the few other modernists he singles out for praise (Kafka, Schoenberg and Celan among ...”

“... would like. Mad Men’s second overt challenge to its own glamour relies on the audience’s self-flattering sense of historical irony, on our consciousness of our social enlightenment relative to the 1960s. ‘How wonderful they look,’ we’re invited to think, ‘but how racist they are, how sexist, how homophobic, how reckless in their diet; what ...”

“... whose allegiances, manipulations and treacheries Mary McCarthy described with satirical (and self-satirising) play in her essay ‘My Confession’, published in Encounter in 1954.City College’s young men were determined to escape naivety and provincialism. They did not recognise the authority of Christian tradition and had little interest in Jewish ...”

“... a ‘political project’, the challenging of the inferiority complex that blights the Scots’ self-image. And the many collaborators on A Claim of Right for Scotland debate the case for last year’s document of that name: it is reproduced in full and seems to me much the most reasonable and impressive manifesto for Scottish nationhood in my lifetime. I ...”

“... Mutiny and has accelerated since Independence, that the country has been restored to an ancient self, while gaining a new freedom and self-consciousness – qualities which, India being India, have been attended, but not so far endangered, by rage, disorder, ‘a million mutinies’. The book does not argue for, or ...”

“... Right.’ To place the judiciary in this way on opposite sides of the same argument seems self-contradictory. Nevertheless it is true that the law, like most other things, has a variety of dynamics and imperatives, some of them at odds with others. Among these are the law’s promise, not of an infallible trial but of a fair one, and the rule that ...”

“... force of productive development for ‘the cunning of reason’ and the struggle of Geist to self-knowledge and self-realisation. Cohen, defending a ‘technological determinist’ interpretation of Marx, takes this line, referring to what he describes as ‘the identity of structure across diversity of ...”

“... the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight ...”

“... most famous, but there are many others: sometimes evidently foolish, sometimes worryingly lucid; self-righteous or ‘humble’; piously outraged or alarmingly dispassionate. None of them speaks for Swift. Readers have often imagined the author’s fury or disgust or horror, but without actually hearing his voice. And yet, at the end, he seemed to declare ...”

“... of distinct ideological and quasi-religious purpose, more aware of his limitations and his lack of self-confidence than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius ...”

“... would bully us into accepting that in morality and aesthetics ‘stoic’ and ‘Horatian’ are self-evidently words of ill omen. A helluva lot of people through the centuries have thought them very honourable words indeed, as Peter Makin certainly knows. There is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young ...”

“... in conduct. Swinburne repudiated Victorianism in the 1860s, and the Victorians were good at self-criticism: as G.M. Young pointed out, ‘the truth is that much of what we call Victorianism is a picture at second-hand, a satirical picture drawn by the Victorians themselves.’ This internal dialogue is the central preoccupation of Gallagher, who rightly ...”

“... from a male point of view. The feminine in his work is always the Other, in distinction to the Self, and understood from the outside rather than from within. But it is precisely from a dialectic between Self and Other that his plays are constructed. We should not, Bamber claims, be interrogating them for an answer to the ...”

“... at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ample ingredients for Labour’s self-examination, how far does he guide the Party towards reassessment? His political tastes limit what he can offer. He writes about people drawn from ‘the British political tradition in which I generally feel most comfortable’, and in several asides he ...”

“... were often subtle, and didactic in no baneful sense. Civilised conduct, which encompassed wit, self-humour and sociability, necessarily excluded bombast. And the presence of women in an active – at times a presiding – role contributed a new measure of incisiveness, sensibility and grace.’ One sees what it is: Steegmuller is beginning to paint an ...”