“... never been demonstrated by Weissbort, nor by anyone else who parrots the judgment as if it were self-evident. Philip Larkin has attracted enough devotees over the years for this slap-happy judgment to cut no ice so far as he is concerned; others of us – and my own special interest is too obvious for me to declare it – are bitterly though resignedly ...”

“... must suppose that nothing more is needed. But this could only be correct if modern economies were self-adjusting systems that didn’t need any management at all. I am driven to the conclusion that such a view – that economies are self-righting organisms which never under any circumstances need management at all – did ...”

“... great advantage of The Same and Not the Same is that it seems unlikely to create a readership of self-made men who believe they have original ideas, after reading one or two popular essays. The book points out that to acquire the simplest possible view of a carbon atom or molecule takes some ten years, not only of learning, listening and reading, but also of ...”

“... have had a permanent and ... useful part to play’. Freud too saw phobias as having to do with self-protection, but where for James the open space evokes evolutionary memory, for Freud it evokes personal memory, and the anxiety felt in agoraphobia ‘seems to be the ego’s fear of sexual temptation – a fear which, after all, must be connected in its ...”

“... Easy’ is a woman writer’s fantasy of the zipless book, of the writing that comes from feminine self-indulgence, from doing exactly what you want. Words flow from the female body like blood or milk, and men come to serve and worship, not to censor. The body is timeless, maternal, a cradle of imagination which makes writing play. These flattering images of ...”

“... what’s worrying you? ... There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self-assured outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily and deified satire; that’s my salvage from an autobiography of him – one of many, as if he were dissatisfied and must always draw and redraw his own picture ... so the inspirer ...”

“... image and interruptions to its surface. ‘Ossip Zadkine’ (1914) A sense of interiority and self-possession is common to all Hamnett’s portraits: they hold the viewer at a distance. Like her still lifes, they are anti-mimetic, creating the impression of a person rather than an exact likeness. Faces are smoothed and abstracted, with features almost ...”

“... merely the obverse of anti-immigrant brutality. They share the presupposition, which is in no way self-evident, that the defence of one’s own way of life is incompatible with ethical universalism. We should avoid getting trapped in the liberal self-interrogation, ‘How much tolerance can we afford?’ Should we tolerate ...”

“... woman. The contrast with Cleopatra is clear. The story of her death is a story of self-destruction. There is no male hero-murderer. Her snakes in the end turn against her, their host, to show that ultimately the power of woman will destroy itself. This story has, of course, elements of pathos. There is a tragedy, almost a heroism, in the ...”

“... and her own for invoking it. In ‘Black Kief and the Intellectual’, the irony is self-lacerating: ‘Ah, miserable at last! Felicity.’ Even her youth is decaying: ‘I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown/My private modern life has gone to waste’ (‘Bedouin of the London Evening’). Her poetry is ecstatic and ...”

“... setting also turns Mislaid into a campus novel. Stillwater College, Zink writes, is ‘as self-contained as an army base. But no basic training. No cleaning, no cooking. The work you had to do consisted of things like ponder Edna St Vincent Millay. If you screwed it up, they didn’t criticise you. They invited you to their offices, offered you ...”

“... though not all were recorded as such, partly to spare the deceased the ignominy of the crime of ‘self-murder’. The city raised hopes and dashed them. In 1731, Charles Cooper, son of a Southwark cheesemonger, ‘not having his task ready, left his satchel and books at a shop, [and] flung himself into the Thames’. Drowning was by far the most common type ...”

“... we inhabit. The poems anatomise the possibility of love in a time of unprecedented corruption, self-interest, lies and destructiveness on the part of global capitalism and its leaders and followers. Sutherland has been publishing pamphlets and books of poems for some 25 years, known at first to a small but steadily increasing number of readers in the UK ...”

“... as she did say more than once – that experiencing the genius almost made up for the booze, the self-harm, the harm to others. What she seemed to care about most in life was painting. She knew what hers gained from looking at Pollock’s and resisting. The space at the Barbican is curious, and can be deadening, but on this occasion it has been put to use in ...”

“... are clearly a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s hippy shift from political action to ‘self-actualisation’, often through some kind of psychic or spiritual awakening. In The Lion, this shows itself in the doubled masculine crisis of a father’s midlife reinvention and a son’s journey from adolescence to manhood. Hoban’s work at times flows ...”