“... during her bleakest periods of despair, she always seems to have been buoyed up by a mysterious, self-sustaining glee. Drunk or sober (more often the former than the latter), flush or destitute, star, salesgirl, call-girl, or, final incarnation, grande dame and monstre sacrée, she never lost a talent for living memorably. Born a ...”

“... source; it certainly ignores, probably wilfully, the extent to which the ‘imagination’ as a self-justifying entity has been called into question by a wide range of modern literary theory. Under Briggflatts may exclude the more obviously secular poetry of its period for reasons to do with the view argued in the essay on Muir and Clarke: its omissions are ...”

“... and beautiful observations have the effect of creating and bringing the reader back to herself, a self all the more quietly egocentric for being as inaccessible today as that of her brother, as much a part of a style and a period. It is impossible to imagine the actuality of William and Dorothy, their being and conversing together, but the scenes that must ...”

“... that the poet and therefore the poem are visibly products of a region – while protecting it-self against anticipated complaints that such a view is insular. When I last wrote about Curnow, in 1963, I backed my text with references to an essay by Allen Tate defending regionalism in literature against an internationalist position which Tate cleverly ...”

“... genocide of the Amerindians) is not even a secret from schoolchildren, fed though they are on the self-censored and sanitised work of academics who identify with the Establishment and cover up its crimes, for whatever careerist or Freudian motives of their own. James Hunter, author of the classic Making of the Crofting Community (1976), has credited Prebble ...”

“... Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s father, Manuel, was so competitive with his own children that he could not accept it when his eldest son began ...”

“... such suckers? Were all their ideas, of good and bad and right and wrong, of God, of manners, of self-endeavour, of a rough and ready egalitarianism ... were all these simply a conspiratorial implant from the class above them? And if so, what are we to make of the Scottish radicals, including Marxists, who sprang almost entirely from this ...”

“... where Charles Edward Stuart had slept, dressing Johnson up in bonnet and broadsword, was not just self-indulgence on Boswell’s part, but a way of proving to himself and to his absent but always censorious father that he, Boswell, remained a true Scot, that London had not seduced him quite from his original identity. Away from the capital and sophisticated ...”

“... the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and self-confident, or already fixed in marble. Or better, like one of those nodding-doll holograms that ceaselessly repeats a greeting. ‘Hallo. I’m Thomas Henry. I’d rather be an ape than a bishop. Hallo, I’m Thomas Henry. I’d rather be an ape than a ...”

“... is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The 19th, by contrast, was less exhaustively documented and now seems to have been nourished on chauvinistic legends rather than the brutality of facts. For ...”

“... city states expected of their citizens. If the Athenians were wrong, they acted in legitimate self-defence. Nietzsche went further. He shared Hegel’s belief that the soul-centred individualism preached by Christ had in essentials come into the world with Socrates; unlike Hegel, he regretted the discovery – or invention – of the Christian ...”

“... I think that I only think that I can think,’ and worries about struggles in his most private self that no one else will understand. This may seem at odds with the man who writes of his hunger for any sort of publicity, but throughout MacDiarmid’s career private anxieties and public pugnacity appear to have fuelled one another. The talented but ...”

“... and they did suggest the liberating drama of a poet feeling her way towards an original style of self-expression. In this new collection, however, McGuckian’s sensibility seems to have become trapped within the idiom. Many of the poems feel syntactically inert, but are forced to stagger forward under an impossible weight of proliferating metaphors. At her ...”

“... Kent – with the bishops sleeping on cork mattresses in student bedrooms and enduring cafeteria self-service at every meal except dinner. It all represents a far cry from the days when even missionary bishops – who, a previous Archbishop of Canterbury once warned, tended to be ‘men of eccentric mode of proceeding’ – would find themselves at ...”

“... dimly), with a few other indistinct figures swimming through the suffocating depths of his self-regard. Wolfe could see clearly enough the myriad disconnected objects that helped to furnish his boundless ego. But like Funes the Memorious, he could neither forget anything he saw nor imagine anything he had not seen. The one subject Wolfe does offer a ...”