“... the two things were co-extensive. Like one of those periods in Chinese history when Confucian self-discipline and Taoist impulsiveness nourished each other, Montale’s inner life was both naively fruitful and sophisticatedly self-aware. It makes him great fun to read, as if the smartest man in the world were a friend ...”

“... of existence: after killing the swan in an excess of naturally unreflective, predatorially self-assertive energy (Wahn, in Wagner’s Schopenhauerean sense), Parsifal’s moral growth begins (like Brünnhilde’s) in compassionate identification. In Syberberg’s Act Two, when Parsifal kisses Kundry and identifies with Amfortas’s suffering, the ...”

“... version completed in the inter-war years. The various psychological dramas that evolve among these self-indulgent courtiers of Japan a thousand years ago can still move the reader. Secondly, strange as it may seem, The Tale of Genji provides a way of understanding an aspect of present-day Japan. The Japanese sense of national identity is intimately linked to ...”

“... as (certain) others are. She must, therefore, be brought lower than these others so as to receive self-knowledge. There are many variations on this theme in O’Connor’s work. In general, the pretensions of such characters are harmless, for they haven’t the power of wealth and cannot seriously oppress anyone. The marks of their pride are trivial. The ...”

“... has been used affirmatively by sexual minorities for the elaboration of appetite into self-definition, it has not been used by them for its regulation. And the general recognition and institutionalisation of the variety of sexual experience has had a relativising effect on traditional morality – the morality that privileges and circumscribes a ...”

“... sensation. Simone de Beauvoir was to cite them in The Second Sex as the archetypal example of ‘self-centred female narcissism’, but also as the discovery by the female of her independent personal existence. The young Katherine Mansfield worshipped them too, and modelled herself on them, and there is a striking similarity, in the appearance of face and ...”

“... early as 1911’, when an emotional bereavement had opened his eyes to the need for more complete self-commitment. Lukacs’s conversion, on this view, is analogous to that of the young Karl Marx: the theorist of alienation converted to Communism under the pressure of political events. And this conversion has been assigned exemplary significance. ‘After ...”

“... the poet’s long-continued search for his father is blended with myth, ‘a strange voyage of self-discovery by the poet’s legendary ancestor’, Immram Mael Duin. Base camp is a pool-hall in New York:Not the kind of place you took your wifeUnless she had it in mind to stripOr you had a mind to put her up for sale.No dream-vision this: the poet is ...”

“... and ever-fresh people, there are added the penetrating simplicities of Swift’s political self. Yet what gives tension to the story and its simplicities is the diverse irony of Swift’s temperament and circumstances, so that the world of Swift is always single and double. Ehrenpreis is nowhere more disciplinedly imaginative than when retailing the ...”

“... of my country.’ He attacks the ‘affected purity’ of the French language and asserts that the self-conscious perfectionism of French writers has ‘unsinewed’ their heroic verse. Virgil identifies Aeneas’s founding of Rome with Augustus’s long stable rule, and Dryden’s version is informed by his experience of civil war, restoration, rebellion and ...”

“... by an absence of nerves and a nation distinguished by its addiction to antimacassars, rhubarb and self-righteousness. Dorothy Strachey appears in his early diaries and autobiographical essays as an effusive elder sister: ‘Dorothy ... kissed me a hundred times, in a rapture of laughter and affection, counting her kisses, when I was six’; as a stiff little ...”

“... the Physiognomonica, attributed in the Renaissance to Aristotle, that a clouded brow ‘signifies self-will (audacia) as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to ...”

“... responsible for is the selection of his subjects. In this at least, it is reasonable to ask for a self-conscious and prudent balancing of considerations of eligibility and hazard, and a firm sense of how authority itself is to be conceived. Where the relation between our surviving knowledge about the human life in question and the content of the ideas which ...”

“... felt constrained by the situation he was in, and his tone is for the most part gentle and self-deprecating. It is, therefore, all the more interesting that in spite of his evident concern not to appear churlish by criticising those who have gathered to honour him he speaks plainly on one point. Parrinder had accused him of being narrowly ...”

“... to confirm this reading: ‘He was a kind of nothing, titleless.’ Nice joke, but a trifle self-regarding. But then who else is an autobiographer to regard, and the first sight is wrong anyway. A title can make you another kind of nothing rather than a something, and we shouldn’t rush past the difference between being titled and being entitled. When ...”