“... of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering ...”

“... was soon to be both heavy and clumsy. The Mirror was saved financially but sadly disfigured by his self-promotion and promises of vast wealth for the readers: assuredly, he lacked the newspaper sense of a Beaverbrook. At least he was against any proliferation of nipples. The new broom had his principles and had given evidence against the publishers of Last ...”

“... India than of simpler and more homogeneous societies that nearly everybody can define him or her self in terms of one minority or another. Political associations based on such catch-all categories as Brahmin and non-Brahmin, Hindu and Muslim, language or region, cannot simply be deduced from social fact. Separatist movements have more usually constituted ...”

“... to quote such large chunks of text, and to allow in, for example, whole passages of elaborate (and self-deceiving) moral analysis: Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment ...”

“... his ‘universe henceforth without master’, and the hero of these poems. The breach between the self and the world is the problem: ‘How to live without being torn between these infinities?’ Popa asked in one of the few short notes he wrote on poetry. What interests him is the dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his ...”

“... might have been a flattering likeness of Mrs Riddle into a masterpiece. Like Poussin’s great self-portrait in the Louvre, it is a painting about art and the making of art. Like Poussin, Cassatt places her sitter’s head in a series of framings which both hold it in place and call attention to the relation between the rectangles within the painting (one ...”

“... written after the move to revolutionary Cuba, is a summary of his life so far, in a self-portrait that’s not the work of a weak man: And after every episode – that’s what you had to call them – of travelling, loving, hating, working, talking, he was left inert, indestructible in a way, as though whole and untouched, not consumed, not ...”

“... If, as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their ...”

“... in France, have compared France’s political leadership unfavourably with New Labour and its self-congratulatory commitment to ‘modernisation’ and a broadly neoliberal economic programme. According to such analyses, the French, in order to sort themselves out, simply need to become more like us. The bicycle ‘race’ in Amsterdam last year after the ...”

“... of the starry heavens. But already by the Sixties and Seventies a new presentation of scientific self began to circulate. James Watson radically confessed that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard on the structure of DNA; Richard Feynman enjoyed having himself photographed playing the bongos, and, like Kary Mullis, broadcast his ...”

“... The attempt to wall Davis off in this way from some ‘real’ LA to which he does not belong is self-discrediting, as is the associated fantasy that insecure Angelenos have embraced Ecology of Fear to smear their city and curry favour with the New York establishment. It is also true, as Davis and his defenders point out, that no scholar’s footnotes could ...”

“... the audience sees: a remarkable figure, an artist reaching a popular audience with an art as self-conscious and self-referential as any élite audience could wish. Invoking a triad proposed by Jameson, Zizek sees Hitchcock as an exponent of realism (in his British films of the Thirties), of Modernism (in his American ...”

“... does occur more often than ‘judgment’ and ‘Hell’? Death is its ineluctable self. Yet it stands for much more besides, especially in the writings of St Paul. Marius should count the number of times that ‘death’ is mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans, and should consider its symbolic, religious meaning. Death meant sin. It was ...”

“... problem? These were questions which he sometimes asked himself; hence his recurrent dream of rural self-sufficiency, the ‘Golden Country’ of 1984, the Henley of Coming Up for Air, the Hebridean adventure which, according to some people, killed him. There is a passage in his War Diary for 1942 in which his rusticrecluse yearnings and his social-scientific ...”

“... does get a little chilly in the long run, and Ulrich, like his creator, has a strange capacity for self-satisfaction alongside his gift for self-criticism. But the writing never stops being funny and illuminating, and we’d be lost if we had to approve of writers in order to keep reading them. Ulrich is a fully developed ...”