“... contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a self-ratifying ‘Sense of Wonder’. This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ...”

“... who was a literate man, shows something of the same ambition, the same nerve, the same boisterous self-confidence. But the Sonnets inscription has more than this to provoke thought. Either T.T. or Mr W.H. is in some sense so much in touch with Shakespeare’s work as to seem to be in touch with Shakespeare too. The ‘ONLIE.BEGETTER.’ is a case in ...”

“... be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and ...”

“... information, merely associative, are here used to create the work’s meaning. In Mark Quinn’s Self, a Saatchi example, the fact that the frozen head is a cast of his own, and is made of solid blood, and his own blood, and a full nine pints of it – none of this visually evident – are important points of attention. You have to have them. And this is ...”

“... dependent on the generosity of the girls’ half-brother, John. But John’s weak gestures towards self-respect are cumulatively beaten down by his rapacious wife. This finely lethal scene fills the second chapter of the book, a chapter universally admired though often called strictly irrelevant, like Margaret. As a number of critics have pointed out, the ...”

“... partly because of his lack of a Wordsworthian or Hazlittian egoism, his permanent and self-knotting tentativeness, something in the work will baulk or turn aside any reader. Hence the quality of the incomplete and the defeating that characterises Coleridge’s enormous body of work. Editing Coleridge is a heroic way of life. Until now, there has ...”

“... her all that she would need. Something else happened. She had asked for it. Jove in his thorough self made love to her. His lightning burned her flesh, ousted her breath. She lay as ashes with the Thunderer. One legend says she went to hell for this. Another saves her inexplicably. She is last seen with what she wanted most: A baby god and ...”

“... light the stranger’s way. The hero who has come to kill Asterion: her half-brother, my son. My self. They betray each other so perfectly: husband to wife, wife to husband; sister to half-brother, and now lover to lover. The symmetries of chaos and bliss. The mysteries. I am the true vine, I am the fennel stalk; and he will be honey: buried to the ...”

“... expectingto become a river of selves, of dis-appearing selves, us allstepping again now into the self-erasingcrowd, the airfull of receipts, of tips, of signals by whichwe are expecting to bechanged. It glides. It carriesme. Ever more alive. I made sureI never had to seethe horizonagain I think – I did – I did itvoluntarily, I think I did ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they supposedly tell about the gods.The distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now. In the words of Bernard Williams, a lie is ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes to be false, which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content’. That makes it relatively easy to ...”

“... novel of initiation and development, in the course of which a young hero is led from adolescent self-absorption and egocentricity on the margins of the social world through a variety of instructive experiences – often a mixture of the erotic and the aesthetic – to a state of adulthood and responsibility at the centre of contemporary ...”

“... that the diarist is not immune from the effects of hindsight, ignorance, partiality, bias and self-justification in what he writes. In Crossman’s case, these distortions are not disabling. He is singularly free from self-deception and his candour often punctures his own pretensions. For instance, the ‘pretty good ...”

“... 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 ...”