“... George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw state, and the very rhythm of her remorseless, circular and outstandingly honest narrative reflects the essentially inward-looking perceptions of a woman, as opposed to the linear undertakings of a man. Therefore, instead of writing ...”

“... men are to earth o’ergiven/these the companions’), but also that he needed to underline the self-abnegation. Sincerity, like patriotism (which Davie has too), is not enough. Moving as these recollections often are, in their evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an ...”

“... or his elect, are rather interesting. The arts to be learned are not those of seduction but of self-esteem, although the means to the desired end are sometimes rather recherché. So promising are the lessons that it seems a great shame that the men on whom the women are allowed to practise offer so little in the way of a challenge. But more than all this ...”

“... conception of Union Street is original, and each of its characters gets a good enough run. But the self-imposed limitations of the structure are always in evidence. There is no doubt at all about the Canadian Margaret Atwood’s being a novelist. Both Lady Oracle (first published in 1976 and now appearing in paperback) and Bodily Harm are splendid ...”

“... book is uncompromising in this regard. Few political writers more than Lippmann stripped the self of its ties to community, family and personal loyalty, in order to enhance the claims of a ‘national’ interest. He perfected the idea that democracy was to be celebrated for (rather than by) the masses by people who knew better, experts who were members ...”

“... ritual of killing, by guillotine or by hanging, was acceptable – but not the ritual of self-inflicted death by choice. I see Mishima’s exit as an act of faith and duty as a patriotic Japanese, and also as the inevitable fulfilment of his very, very personal artistic ideal. It has long been in our tradition that any ...”

“... not make the country’s present agonies any less horrible, or Beirut’s relentlessly detailed self-dismantling – much of it performed on prime-time television – any less unprecedented, and interminably, senselessly miserable to witness. The whole process has by now become a large-scale version of the Laurel and Hardy film of two men who vengefully ...”

“... with their torches were acclaiming the very type of the accursed poet and immoralist: moreover a self-conscious member of the ‘aristocracy of intellect’ who repeatedly distrusted the people he saw as ‘the masses’ and the ‘ganglia arguments’ that directed their minds. Strindberg was equal to the occasion. He wrote in a special birthday ...”

“... sins of the flesh secures him employment as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one ...”

“... also going through lean times. So are the American Democrats. But trouble is one thing: systematic self-mutilation is another. Despite their current difficulties, neither the American Democrats nor the German Social Democrats give off the smell of death. With the possible exception of the French Communists, Labour is the only mass party of the Left which has ...”

“... of perceiving, judging, wanting and the like, an additional experience of the unity of the self whose experiences they are? If the generalisations of science extend, as they do, to the unobserved and now unobservable past, how can our present observations provide grounds for rational belief in them? These are among the central internal problems of ...”

“... general ‘idea’ of the work.* David Aers is altogether more ambitious and more theoretically self-aware than Terry Jones, but he too rides a hobby-horse too hard, and in the process grows deaf to tone. Aers’s central argument is that great poets often speak truer than they know. Langland, and, to some extent, Chaucer, accepted the dominant views of ...”

“... sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or cultivated fields, with one pointed church-steeple signalling the way to the next, above the horizon. But amid those ...”

“... by Pope, aglow with egocentric fervours of ‘urbanity’, but a drier, low-key, scurrilous and self-under-cutting figure (perhaps equally unlike the real Horace) whose ‘laughing satire’ unsettles and undermines instead of issuing defiant self-assertions. This, for the most part, is the Swift who is represented ...”

“... that Hardy was fond of the remembered young man who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him much: his principal subjects are business and health. It is ...”