“... to the Other – to my linguistic community as a whole – before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. Who, then, wrote the first poem? If poetry, like potholing, is a practice governed by certain public conventions, then surely those conventions had to be always ...”

“... to disqualify him from presenting himself as an eternal and uncompromising rebel. What made this self-presentation so irresistible a target was Bourdieu’s certainty, repeated in book after book, that scholarship boys from lowly provincial backgrounds will invariably sell their souls to the institutions which elevate them, and that their claims to ...”

“... can be judged by their covers, others by their titles. The American edition of Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages is subtitled ‘What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living’. At some point, the British publisher changed it to the anodyne ‘A Journey into the Medieval Mind’. Did they think the seven deadly sins sounded too ...”

“... object pleasure not truth’, and his particular conception of Imagination as an internal and self-enclosed harmonisation, ‘extends and elaborates the Kantian analyses of the aesthetic experience’. McGann favours poets with a more activist or ‘illocutionary’ conception of their art: Blake rather than Wordsworth, or the Language poets rather than ...”

“... genealogy. But instead of Said’s relentless polemic, Chakrabarty’s book features critique and self-criticism in equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the edge here, because for Said the Orient is a Western construct, an instrument of domination: he doesn’t – and never went on to – explore the profound ways in which modern Orientals ...”

“... just people! Yet I still feel the solution ‘something crucial’ was the right one. My son’s self-confidence is perhaps inherited. At which point the sunlight enters the room and falls across my computer screen. This is always infuriating. I can’t see anything. Since this room has no curtains I will have to pull the shutters to and work in artificial ...”

“... 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 ...”