“... 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 ...”

“... listen for silence.(‘What else’)No single word of this/is any more than decoration of an old self-magnifying wish/to throw the self away so violently and widely …/it can’t, because its motor runs on a conviction that if I understood/my own extent of blame then that would prove me agent; it doesn’t/want to face a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”