“... reflection. But though he thinks it fails as a programme, ‘the description of the ethical self’ it offers, a self grounded in a particular society and way of life, a self constituted and given value by dispositions and habits of character, is one to which he is broadly ...”

“... whom Turner shares one of the two informative ‘improving’ journals he regularly takes. The self-portrait Turner sketches in his diary is of a young man who naturally has little time for the ‘good friends, neighbours, acquaintances, intimates, gossips, lovers, haters, foes, farters, friskers, cuckolds, and all other sorts of Christians of what name or ...”

“... Kafka, Nabokov, Grass, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Bellow, Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his remembered literary pleasures is astonishing, there is little ostentation in his manner. What most ...”

“... them altogether. He has become a martyr figure somewhat after the fashion of Schoenberg, also self-appointed to a role of revolutionary innovator; the special prize Boulez has paid is not increasing isolation but creative sterility – compositions have flowed ever more slowly from his pen. (Répons, 1980, for ensemble and live electronics, is his only ...”

“... another. Kissinger, for whom the history of the period is little more than a grab-bag for his own self-glorification as an actor in it, can be forgiven for maintaining that China’s war on Vietnam was a vital blow against the Soviet Union and a stepping-stone to victory in the Cold War. That the Sino-American alliance he negotiated, and Deng escalated, had ...”

“... a moral turn, not least inside the Dutch Reformed Church, which fatally undermined the regime’s self-confidence? And was not that turn inspired by the example of Mandela in the ultimate non-violent situation, banged up on Robben Island? What about those equally startling velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, or more recently in Burma? Most ...”

“... classes whose sequestered vita contemplativa could accommodate a more embracing care of the bodily self and whose self-presentation traditionally worked in elements of secular hypochondria or sacred asceticism. The tone became more hectoring; blanket prohibitions took the place of qualified advice; custom was generally ...”

“... has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of ...”

“... of In Memoriam and the fullest manuscript of ‘Maud’. The ramifications of Tennyson’s self-borowings can be followed more accurately and usefully; as for revision, two brief examples from ‘Maud’ may suffice to show the richness of the added material. In I iv the speaker has a vision of cruel and violent Nature: ‘And the whole little wood ...”

“... who suffers from it, and people in life are much more mysterious than people in literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional ...”

“... though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed self-presenter (in Shaw’s case self-promoter too, though of course not as musician); both are outrageously biased and flamboyantly exhibitionistic. The differences are that Shaw is wide-ranging, intellectually ...”

“... unshy predictions as to the revolutionising of American letters. Kerouac was never one to be self-effacing, but neither was he slow to praise the fluttering genius of his pals. ‘By virtue of my youth and enthusiasm and fire,’ Jack writes to Sebastian, of their friend Ian/Yann, he has been reborn: perhaps! But by virtue of his weary knowledge, his ...”

“... at the age of 31. Faulks also suggests that they lived and died in the shadow of war. This is self-evidently so with Hillary, while it can be plausibly argued that the slaughter of the Great War was a determining element in Wood’s background and that the Cold War contributed to Wolfenden’s early death. The trio differed in their sexuality – Wood was ...”

“... other extreme Catholicism, in a fraught political and emotional climate where everything from the self to the nation was open to invention. Declan Kiberd tries in this vast, wide-ranging book to find various contexts in which the literature of the Irish Renaissance can be placed. To write a deliberately new style, whether Hiberno-English or Whitmanian ...”

“... no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels like to live inside a new political bubble that’s stretched to bursting point. But let us first address what is known about the life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted ...”