“... use of, who regretted too late that he hadn’t had more sex. In ‘Late Flowering Lust’ the self-mockery of the elderly lover, ‘my head is bald my breath is bad,’ going through the motions with ‘brandy-certain aim’, is brought to a shuddering halt by the mental image that lurks in the very idea of old-age love-making, the embrace of ...”

“... and which are not always easy to tell apart. Which is the one that has litost – a form of self-pity – and which is the one that has ‘unbearable lightness of being’? Which of these two conceptions, for that matter, we may even sometimes wonder, is which? His fertility, narrative gift, gift for experiments and impromptus, are such as to bewilder ...”

“... is in need of qualification. The question Banville has always asked in his novels is: what must a self, or an identity or a narrator be (or be like) if qualification is the name of the game? To qualify something or someone is at once to legitimate it, and to go on explaining it. Banville, an extraordinary stylist, has always had an ear for the strange ...”

“... inaugural lecture at Oxford. Berlin distinguished between positive liberty – broadly speaking, self-government – and negative liberty: the freedom of the individual from government interference. Berlin, a liberal pluralist, contended that there was no sure connection between democratic self-rule and the liberty of the ...”

“... both protects and inhibits, and ‘has yet to shatter’. A more overtly intense confluence and self-alienation occurs in the superb title-poem of Muldoon’s new collection, in which he imagines an encounter between the chief of a Red Indian tribe and some British military colonists: We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender and the ...”

“... confides his thoughts or agonies or intentions to the audience at a moment of prayer or religious self-exhortation: the hero addresses a shrine, or makes a sacrifice, or calls on the gods to forgive or punish him (or punish his enemies), and the audience ‘overhears’ him – such is the convention. It is a little like reading the Psalms. Shakespeare’s ...”

“... choose us! The mise-en-scène is indefinitely repeated; readings of Dickinson replicate her self-image, like a virus taking over the natural function of a cell. When Thomas Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955, it was thought that her texts had finally been restored to the state in which, had she agreed to be published at all, she ...”

“... true authority. Women would lose from formal equality, the antis insisted, since it was through self-abnegation and moral guidance that they most effectively exercised power. ‘We hold that it is through the faithful fulfilment of duty, through service, not self-assertion, that woman will arrive at a true conception of ...”

“... adherents greet with acclaim. It is the task of the Aufklärer to bring truth to the befuddled, self-deluded masses, whose surrogate in the case of critique is the self-blinded literary text. In contemporary critique, however, good old-fashioned Enlightenment terms like truth, fact and objectivity are generally draped in ...”

“... early twenties. The novel’s qualities are those of immodest youth: it is ambitious, energetic, self absorbed, bursting with hormonal vehemence and self-consciousness. Structure and sequence (or plot) are not its strong points. The good bits are bits, hit you straight on, and mostly have to do with the ...”

“... The eighth Duke of Marlborough was ‘rude, erratic, profligate, irresponsible and lacking in self-control’, his son was ‘a paranoid and anti-semitic reactionary’. Randolph Churchill was ‘rude, spoiled, unstable, headstrong, irresponsible and argumentative’. Ivor Guest was ‘an incorrigible snob and social climber’; his son Freddie was ‘a snob, a playboy and a lightweight ...”

“... segment of Israeli society which accepts the legitimacy of the Palestinian quest for national self-determination; nor will Israelis concede that Zionism, however good it may have been for the Jews, has inflicted great suffering on the Arabs of Palestine and still continues to do so. Conversely, the Palestinians have so far been entirely unable to ...”

“... The self-portrait by Gwen John hanging in the National Portrait Gallery was painted in 1899 or 1900. She is dressed in the formal costume of the period: a tight-waisted blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a big black bow at the neck. Her hair is tied back and her hands are on her hips. She is slightly turned away from us, so only one hand is visible ...”

“... Modernist enterprise itself so enthralling. But no, Hughes is all straightforward, unhesitating self-assurance. This is only one of the reasons I am left dissatisfied with, even annoyed by, American Visions. My other sources of annoyance can best be posed as a series of questions. The first question I want to ask is: where does all this material ...”

“... in Brunei and incursions across the Sabah and Sarawak borders. In contributing to Malaysian self-defence, we were honouring the terms of a treaty that formed part of the UK’s national defence policy. The same applied to the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who served alongside us. The United States was, at the time, preoccupied with Vietnam, to ...”