“... his acknowledgment that it shows perfectly the narrator ‘in his real colours, as the fantastic self wno hates and refuses contact with reality.’ The combination of that reality-hating self with a relentlessly logical mind finicky in its demand for accuracy gives Poe’s most outrageous stories their unique flavour, and ...”

“... poets (Hamilton was an early failed one), could turn their sense of the awfulness of things and of self into quietly aesthetic relish and enjoyment, or – in Baudelaire’s case – a resonant panache. Hamilton lacked even that compensatory refuge: no doubt because in his case a full transmutation into art, with all its paradoxical liberations and ...”

“... political malpractice of deficit public finance to pay for current public consumption rather than self-redeeming investment. Galbraith denounces defence spending in particular, but of course in recent years transfer payments to individuals have annually exceeded the defence budget. In that regard it is most revealing that even at a time of prolonged ...”

“... of powerlessness: the powerlessness of the subject, whether alive or not, to detach him or her self from the simulacrum that is being produced. Sometimes Hugh David loses confidence in his own process, and has to reassure himself and the reader by repeating a catchphrase of the period at the end of a paragraph. Today the Struggle ... or, rather ...”

“... comfort to those who like to believe that ‘the problems of post-colonial nations are largely self-inflicted.’ There is shrewd analysis of certain habitual expressions of Naipaul, his use of such words as ‘mimicry’, ‘parasitism’, ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’, ‘self-violation’, ‘exile’ (rather than ...”

“... a given, whose components and attributes must always be there to be known or discovered, seems self-evident to the medical patient, the medical practitioner, the micro-biologist of the present day. Much writing in medical history takes it for granted that our current approaches to knowing and describing the body correspond exactly to an objective reality ...”

“... language generally devoted to notions of stubborn defensiveness (‘stonewalling’), or patient, self-denying collaboration (‘keeping your end up’), or long experience (‘a good innings’), or humorous cunning (‘yorker’, ‘googly’, ‘chinaman’), or occasional bafflement (‘stumped’), and only in a few instances of vainglorious triumph ...”

“... Italy, there was a continuous tradition of secular literature in Hebrew, followed by a more self-consciously programmatic secular literary movement that began in Moses Mendelssohn’s Germany and moved east to Poland and Russia, generating journals and literary coteries as well as some original writers. But Harshav, aware of the way languages ...”

“... cheerfully informal, suited the British. Alain Prost’s articulate reasonableness fed a French self-image. Senna was good-looking, ruthless, remote and intense. He was a touch spiritual – he would read his Bible on flights back and forth to Europe and was not averse to attributing his more inspired moments to a force greater than his own – and fiercely ...”

“... rates. Yet homeopathy very soon felt itself pinched between practice and orthodox inflation. Once self-styled scientific medicine came to run the health cartel the most percipient attacks on its authority have seldom come from those with shares in the monopoly. Doctors have been understandably quiet about their interests. Even their most strongly argued cases ...”

“... must reconcile ourselves to the fact that electronic man does not in all ways share our view of self and world. The majority of readers of the LRB will no doubt sigh regretfully in sympathy, but if I read Bolter correctly, it is not only the humanist who is thus challenged. ‘The issue is not whether the computer can be made to think like a human, but ...”

“... that Scott was a liar, fraud, sponger and crook and dismissed Andrew Newton as a perjurer and a self-advertising ‘chump’. This wasn’t the whole content of his very long summing-up, and at one time, as Waugh shows, he seemed to be suggesting to the jury that there had been a conspiracy to kill and not (as the defence suggested) to frighten. But the ...”

“... proudly to their grannies, ex-husbands, and the like. These sensitives were now exposed as shoddy self-deluders. Auden understood about the real, the hidden and depressed, readership for poetry: these poets of 1969 were even more hidden, more depressed and very likely ate in even nastier cafeterias than the types Auden had in mind. They had probably never ...”

“... of January 1906. In Volume Two of the diary Beatrice had already escaped from the neurotic self-analysis and sense of guilt which had characterised the first instalment; now in Volume Three we are aware of a confident, outgoing, independent-minded and very sociable woman approaching her fifties. In these entries, even before the defeat of the Balfour ...”

“... attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his friends’ kindness – their nursing, gifts of money, oysters and port – by making them verse-offerings and penning ...”