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“... poet’, Sappho – a distorted and fragmentary figure who serves mainly to mother paradigms of self-indulgent emotionalism in female poets’ verse, and of self-destructive emotion in a poet’s life. In The Obstacle Race Greer was, by and large, sympathetic to the efforts of female painters. In Slip-Shod Sibyls she can ...”

“... so overtly. To consent to be seen publiclyattempting it is by implication to proclaim one’s self-confidence well-founded. How, it might be asked, could anyone have the nerve? Well, one obvious strategy for mustering the nerve is to derive the self-confidence from a confident identification (‘affiliation’ is the ...”

“... recapitulated a bathetic version of the plot of Flaubert’s most famous book – but he lacks the self-awareness to see any of this. Barnes, on the other hand, who turned 65 last month, beams self-awareness like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. He knows that he, too, is one of Flaubert’s parrots, like many – Braithwaite would ...”

“... on the way they were witnessed; part of the value of the act was its ability to inspire others by self-display. Julius Caesar several times remarks that his soldiers perform more bravely when under his gaze; Roman authors of the early imperial period, on the other hand, examine the non-exemplary deaths of civil war. The heroes of Lucan’s poem Bellum ...”

“... veils and avoidance. So much of Woodman’s subsequent imagery and artifice is already present in Self-Portrait at 13 that it almost undoes any sense of her development as a photographer. There is the domestic yet mysterious setting, the Gothic ambitions, the use of blurs conjured by various technical means, the deployment, both open and furtive, of her own ...”

“... memoirs that are also currently in vogue.) The feminine first-person narrative is unabashedly self-involved. It is knowing and urbane, but it is also showily neurotic and self-derogatory. It is more risqué in content – more spikey in style – than the ‘Me and Mine’ cluckings of a Libby Purves, but it is ...”

“... and partly because Kevin on the outside was just as poisonous as Kevin on the in (the drip-drip of self-serving innuendo never ceased). A seemingly contrite and humbled Rudd returned to the fold. It was too late: the party was now on a hiding to nothing and Rudd led them to defeat in the general election. So they dumped him for good. Can’t work with ...”

“... of contact, compromise, society, nations, glitter – a sort of vengeful, principled, aggressive self-absorption. The two titles Abusing the audience and I am an in habitant of the ivory tower give an idea of the stance. And what could be a more authentic product of this privacy-cultivating outsider (and face of the ‘me-generation’ of the Seventies) than ...”

“... business.’ To write with complete accuracy to any set of facts is hard even for the diligent and self-critical. I think with rue of a couple of half-inaccuracies in my own recent book on Beardsley (to which Ms Benkovitz’s notes make generous acknowledgment though her text has paid it little heed). It is no more than human bad luck that her Herbert Horne ...”

“... rather close little corporation’, as Arthur called them, had a boundless talent for self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away. Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of 14, after the ...”

“... it. An incompetent king spawned a needless crisis that was then worsened by his narrow-minded, self-interested opponents. No one wanted the war but it lasted more than ten years and nothing good came of it: ‘It was a hard war to idealise.’ Once the parliamentarians, who held the advantage of manpower and treasure, defeated the king on the ...”

“... each interestingly interferes with the other. Raine’s images, by contrast, are too fastidiously self-regarding, too enraptured by their own show-off contrivance, to light up actual bits of the world. Rather than setting up a revealing interplay between sensation and idea, they dissolve the former into the latter. A woman’s lips (the book is obsessed with ...”

“... emphasises her consistency. The short, irregular, wary, slow-paced lines; the constant self-interrogation; the slow burn of anger against consumer society, against sexism, against the false parts of the Californian dream; the mix of bizarrely observed visual detail and overheard, reframed cliché – they’re all still there, from the false cheer ...”

“... in Britain as well as in India. It represents not merely a relic of the past but a vibrant, self-generating, living myth. Its collective memory, images and symbols have proved indispensable to the definition of Englishness, or perhaps Britishness. In the ‘sceptical’ 1960s, Trevor Royle tells us, some people considered the British Raj a ‘shameful ...”

“... whose eclectic methods and influences make one unsure by which end to try and grasp him. His early self-exile to an apprenticeship in Paris as a poet and translator, absorbing the lessons of the ‘high’ aesthetic rigorists – Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan – was an unexpected preliminary to his return to America and, after several years, his ...”