“... considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has nothing to declare but its ...”

“... of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self. This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those ...”

“... in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making him ill. Wordsworth was writing with troubled urgency, as though his poems were a necessary psychological bulwark: ‘As I have had no books I have been obliged ...”

“... shorter write-up. At times she played along. She became a much sought-after speaker, known for her self-ironising and performative talks, which did nothing to undermine her image as a sexy and somewhat ditzy party girl. But critics mistook the persona for the writer, and paid little attention to her actual texts. The reception of her 1992 novel Fransk åpning ...”

“... The movie’s strength is in pinpointing the gap between the characters’ actual lives and their self-flattering fantasies, political and personal. Sammy and Rosie are a relentlessly trendy married couple (he’s an accountant, she’s a social worker) who sleep around on principle, and wonder why their own relationship seems so empty. Sammy is ...”

“... and John Ford’s repeated use of Monument Valley – to which, looking ahead to the genre’s self-consciously florid sunset, one might add Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Mexico’ and Sergio Leone’s sensationally arid Leone-land. Although he glosses over the degree to which, a half-century before Hollywood, the weekly ‘dime novel’ and the Wild West Show ...”

“... in that designation – is resistant to understanding and explication. Much in its development, self-rebuke, heuristic methodology and findings may never be altogether cleared up. And in so far as it is a critique of all metaphysical pretentions, and a series of exercises which the reader is meant to reject after having striven with the utmost honesty to ...”

“... whatever their size, power or stage of development, enjoyed equal rights of sovereignty and self-determination – the idea that Woodrow Wilson had championed in 1918 – enjoyed, at best, a fragile foothold in world affairs. In the post-war world, however, faith in the capacity of intervention to stabilise international relations became far more ...”

“... that they send the reader back to the poem. The poem, like the landscape it describes, claims a self-sufficiency and recognises no obligation to be more than itself. Now this may seem to be an easy task, to describe a series of landscapes but to withhold any explanation beyond the grasp of a child, and at the simplest level we examine this testimony as we ...”

“... first, Parfit considers what it is for a theory of rational action to be, in any of various ways, self-defeating. He deals, very subtly, with such problems as this: if one believes that one’s aim should be to produce the best outcomes all round, it is very unlikely that the best way to do this is to consider, on each occasion, how one can bring about the ...”

“... what belonged to an earlier phase of existence yet change it to make it comply with a different self-image – that makes it difficult to decide what to do with Wordsworth, another keen reviser, and a more difficult case than Yeats. The Prelude, for instance, remained in manuscript, indeed in a good many variant manuscripts, until after his death. This ...”

“... But – this is what he doesn’t know – his indecision is not the cause of his incessant self-examination: it is his self-examination’s side-effect. It is the sign of activity, not its opposite. He worries about the decisions he has already made before the results kick in, but that is a sign that he is making ...”

“... boy from an undocumented Salvadorean immigrant family, goes out with a glamorous and maddeningly self-sufficient artist, and prepares for two separate once-in-a-generation storms to hit the city. But there’s another kind of plot running through 10:04: the story of how Ben set out to write one version of his novel and then scrapped his plan and came to ...”

“... an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, ‘matter articulate’. Modern-day materialists, Turner complains, talk about matter, but unlike Thomas they cannot hear ...”

“... want one’s foreign protagonists sounding too English. The prevailing tone is ironic, a form of self-protection Shostakovich hopes ‘might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes’.The ironic tone doesn’t prevent the novel being a three-part story of woe, each misery worse than the ...”