“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forms of human life. The years from the 1780s to the 1850s saw, not only the first great phase of self-sustained economic growth, but also the first great phase of self-sustained discussion about poverty. Throughout this period, the poor, the tired and the huddled masses forced themselves on public attention in greater ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... freedom. What entangles us and so endangers that freedom is our propensity to be deceived by a self-indulgent resort to myth and fantasy, a resort which makes us the all too easy victims of those who use myth and fantasy to enchant us. But already in the early novels two kinds of progress are evident. One is in understanding how it is the novelist as well ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor like his father, or as a clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that ...”

“... Genealogy of Morality – but rather that the ‘English psychologists’ appear to be driven by self-loathing. Under the cover of cool empiricism lies a ‘secret, malicious … instinct to belittle humans’, or a disillusioned idealism, or maybe just ‘a bit of everything, a bit of vulgarity, a bit of gloominess, a bit of hostility to Christianity, a ...”

“... and tailored’ strike (a characteristic Obama phrase) which would also exact a painful toll? This self-contradictory presentation was partly owing to another of the forces urging American ‘punishment’, namely the advocates of humanitarian war, and chief among them the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice. Her stance differs very little from ...”