“... 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 ...”

“... of his youth (his father was a distinguished West Country physician) into a world of sexual self-awareness and reasonable contentment. The flight from England, via the gondoliers of Venice and a house on the zattere, to invalidism at Davos Platz became, in that biography, the model of a whole type of Victorian upper-class career. The relationship ...”

“... a poem which raises the whole issue of ‘maturity’. That ponderous term, stale with Leavisian self-importance, may seem inappropriate when applied to a poem which takes its dramatis personae from popular commodity culture and which is dazzlingly funny in its idiom and execution, its line running on so energetically that it transforms its feminine rhymes ...”

“... writers on manuscript material and the ‘scientific’ study of early printed texts. As self-made scholars, their careers are heroic. Wise left school early and had his higher education from the Camden Road Mutual Improvement Society. Neither went to university. Each achieved more single-handedly, in the way of scholarship, than whole departments of ...”

“... onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick shift of view. As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them ...”

“... as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it. I do not want to exaggerate, in a self-pitying or self-dramatising way, the present extent or intensity of this dislike; I am not thinking of the philosopher as emblematically represented by the figure of Socrates, the martyr to free thought who reaches what ...”

“... we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the shooting of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944. The commander of this massacre, SS Captain Erich ...”

“... in certain cases, but the distinction between intellectus and res does not typically require self-instantiation in this way, or the only true sentences would be those which do self-instantiate – like ‘This sentence is in English.’ Shell tells us that Heidegger ‘seems to suggest’ that truth is ‘in this sense ...”