“... 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 ...”

“... precepts into practice. The Courtier can be seen – from one point of view – as the ultimate self-consuming artefact. Supposedly practical, it leaves an attentive reader helpless to carry out the enterprise for which it claims to provide practical guidance (all later etiquette books reveal the same disjunction between form and function). Like ...”

“... Iceland had conquered Haggard before Haggard penetrated to Iceland; and through Haggard the Viking self-image reached generations of Empire-builders. Meanwhile in France the likes of Gobineau (who claimed Norman blood) were writing ‘Roman, Welsh ... whoever is not born German has been born to be a servant’; Baudelaire was getting away with drivel like ...”

“... purposes like livestock.’ The objective is to abolish native title, Aboriginal benefits and self-determination, along with multiculturalism and immigration. In order to avert the ‘danger’ of Australia ‘being swamped with Asians’, an ancient blood libel is peddled once again, with a sensational lack of logic. If native title is ...”

“... own terms, a process Emerson traces in a chapter devoted to his gradual entrance into literary self-consciousness. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Russian criticism slowly revived from the years of terror, and a good deal of archival research was done on Bakhtin, which is still continuing. Several early works, notably his remarkable essays on the ...”

“... without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get above itself and spit like a snake. Penman’s value lies in the way he occupies this clerical post, as reporter, commentator, without feeling the ...”

“... she is not forgotten. Her portrait of herself and her daughter Julie, now in the Louvre, and her self-portrait in the National Gallery are likely to be recognised, even if people do not remember who they are by. ‘Until a few decades ago,’ Angelica Goodden writes, Vigée Le Brun ‘seemed to many lovers of painting beside the point, charming and seductive ...”