“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poem of his first book, Nil Nil (1993), imagined a sullen second persona being spawned from self-inflicted defeat in a one-man game of snooker; successive poems in that book and his next volume, God’s Gift to Women (1997), brought in twin sisters, a foetus seen as an effigy, a dead brother, the repetitions of parenthood and family more generally, the ...”

“... to, the Fashion, could not trust his Works with the Vulgar without Notes longer than the Work, and Self-praises, to tell them what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was taught to read with his Eyes. The image of Georgian England that still prevails today, some commentators argue, is Georgian England as Pope saw ...”

“... with the way some men behave when a love affair turns sour. Most men, he argues, will attempt self-justification, telling themselves that ‘“she did not deserve my love,” or “she disappointed me,” or offering some other such “reasons”’. This is a ‘profoundly unchivalrous attitude’, since it burdens the abandoned woman ‘not only with ...”

“... a second wife in circumstances felt as not altogether usual:       his fair daughter’s self, as I avowedAt starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll goTogether down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ is a tricky poem: very striking in its own ...”

“... its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging self-justification and would-be poetic observation of the world one is about to abdicate. The novel’s randy but decrepit hero is Raphael Haffner, aged 78: a retired London banker whose wife has recently died. We first encounter him inside a wardrobe in a hotel ...”

“... glows with a godly aura. Among the ‘New Hoover Convertibles’ is The New Jeff Koons (1980), a self-portrait which, enlarged from a family photo of the artist-to-be not long after his fateful encounter with the cereal box, also radiates a special wellbeing, here the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. Shirt buttoned up, hair neatly combed, young ...”

“... He testifies before Congress in support of Nasa’s Earthlike Planet Seeker programme, a giant self-assembling mirror to be deployed near Jupiter with the aim of detecting habitable planets and alien life. After the coup, the project is scotched along with the NextGen Telescope, $12 billion and thirty years in the making (a device that sounds a lot like ...”

“... not getting through, can stand in the way of the storytelling impulse. If there’s no room for a self-conscious narrator any more, there’s always the self-consciousness of the characters to fall back on: and Lively’s characters, here as in her other novels, are nothing if not ...”

“... the first thirty years of his life – the period that culminated in the writing of The Divided Self, his first and best book – together with a lengthy diatribe on what he takes to be contemporary psychiatry. One cannot but be appalled and angered by much of what is said here. ‘No facts,’ Laing tells us in the introduction, ‘are in ...”

“... and scientific – connected? For Nauman they are all rooted in a fundamental splitting of the self. Almost in a Lacanian way he intimates that our mirror image, however coherent and intimate it might appear, is actually divided and alien, and that narcissism easily flips into aggression. When video art first emerged, Rosalind Krauss theorised it in terms ...”

“... to it honour, peace of mind and the welfare of their children. It is the foundation of their self-worth, despite the daily evidence on every street in every part of town that money does not necessarily reward energy and virtue, or punish stupidity and sloth. Though dimly aware that money is an invention of human beings, they ascribe to it an external ...”