“... and misunderstood. Form is part of the problem. Don Juan’s playfulness and extreme self-consciousness endear it to ambiguity-inclined, sophisticated modern readings; the Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold (Auden called it a ‘disastrous choice’) required of Byron a sometimes off-putting dignity. Other charges go beyond form. Taking Childe ...”

“... of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and people less self-acquainted than you might think.But Lawrence was referring to something more mysterious than that. He was saying that the tale and its artist are intrinsically opposed to each other, that the conscious artist is a sort of necessary evil who sets out (in ...”

“... print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the ...”

“... in movies of the 1950s, after a bad stumble in the postwar years, was as carefully planned, self-disciplined and sustained as such a major shift of direction in an artist’s work can be. It led from the enviable lustre of a sentimental star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns ...”

“... strange one and necessarily full of contradictions, of which her uncompromising zeal for self-exploitation is one. Madame Colette, though never quite Madame Colette de l’Académie Française – one game she couldn’t crack – was accorded a state funeral by the French government: this was the woman who was dismissed by her second husband’s ...”

“... or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers – those who might see Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a major intellectual figure – who celebrate Naipaul as an original voice, a writer ...”

“... that comes from Plato into the Christian tradition. This world picture, contributing to human self-assurance, prevented men educated in our traditions from seeing the biosphere as it is, until very recently. In fact, civilised human beings are remarkable among animal species for being sex-obsessed, and for their habits of indiscriminate killing and wanton ...”

“... Liberal thinkers are keen on self-criticism, a necessary discipline for those who don’t accept intellectual authority. But it can have embarrassing moments, when too much is stripped away and exposed. Most of the essays in Public and Private in Social Life explore aspects of ‘the familiar liberal conception of public and private’; three are ‘external’ critiques of liberal thought, and three describe related distinctions drawn in distant cultures ...”

“... when seemingly most directly rooted in reality; they yield a series of images, of kaleidoscopic self-projections, but allow us to draw no conclusions about the inner life of the author, apart from the obvious one that the instinct for self-revelation and the instinct for ...”

“... can wait for less demanding times. All this is finely done, but she gives most of her attention to self-conscious hypocrites, or at least to those who do not have to look very far to detect their own dishonesty. One of her favourite authors, Moliére, provides a gross instance, Tartuffe, and an example also of the destructive hatred of hypocrisy, in ...”

“... or assisted suicide. A physician may not, in most jurisdictions, administer or prescribe for self-administration a lethal drug for the purpose of ending life, even at the explicit request of a fully competent patient. Yet a physician is legally permitted (sometimes legally required) to take other steps that hasten death, if requested to do so by the ...”

“... of maths problems. In ‘Free Fruit for Young Widows’ a grocer recounts to his son murders of self-defence committed by his friend, an Israeli philosophy professor, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during the Sinai War of 1956. Halfway through the telling the boy thinks: ‘Nice story … Sad. But also happy … Survival, that’s what ...”

“... tension, frustration, and the inevitable aggression against the object of desire, but also moral self-doubt and, in the case of puritans, self-hatred.’ (And women? Well, ‘women suffer in their own way from sexual conflicts, but the result is not anti-male hysteria.’) In Melanesia and parts of Brazil, women are not ...”

“... whatever’ – but it’s obvious to everyone around him that his moist desperation and air of self-congratulation are to blame. Some of the more unjust rejections in Tulathimutte’s work are the product of sexual racism. The masturbauteur in Private Citizens, a programmer called Will, complains that he is ‘pigeonholed as another Asian castrato’, and ...”

“... try to avoid deceiving ourselves’. He cites the conclusion of the editors of a symposium on self-deception, that though ‘it promotes short-run psychological health ... Long-run psychological health is thereby constrained.’ He seems unaware of the research which suggests that the mentally healthy are more likely to have a deficient perception of ...”