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“... then tackle our own deficiencies. The last of those problems is to a great extent a measure of our self-confidence. The British or, as they used to be known, the English, who are in fact the group most closely concerned, were for many centuries without an inferiority complex. This ‘complacency’ carried with it a number of unattractive characteristics, but ...”

“... those three lines from ‘Class’ in the first person, rather than that impersonal but also self-addressing ‘you’. ‘Tramontana at Lerici’, a poem from about the time of the Lubbock incident, begins in the second person. This ‘you’ with ‘might’ and ‘should’ in attendance allows speculations about the sort of experiences anyone could ...”

“... of the Diaspora are restored to potency by nationhood; there they acquire their full capacity for self-transformation; the Jews, just like Henry, have a right and a duty to begin again, to slough off being low-profile in a Gentile world and seize their counterlife. Such ideas – since this is a novel, and since its protagonist only has to hear one ...”

“... the child’s earliest bonds with its mother, whom the infant experiences as inseparable from the self, and the child’s growing capacity to develop relationships with other people who will be experienced as separate beings. The infant knows transitional objects as almost inseparable parts of the self and, at the same ...”

“... scheming or contriving’ – that ‘infinitely’ telling us that we are hearing his own proud self-estimation. So ‘unconsciously’ means not noticing something in himself. The evasive double negative (‘nor perhaps refrain’) emphasises his refusal to admit his own calculations to himself. We would now probably say that his motivation was ...”

“... of discussion off the table. Honour itself is not a patient word, and Empson also liked to talk of self-respect, as in the following brilliant passage from Seven Types of Ambiguity: people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their ...”

“... and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – had made use of its large majority to write a self-denying debt brake into the German constitution. If Berlin was to regain fiscal credibility, it needed to reverse the huge deficits run up during the financial crisis. Merkel’s new finance minister would have to rein in the financial demands of the ...”

“... the poetry conveys its most potent sense of Thomas’s elusive selfhood at the very moment that self nears the brink of dissolution. This dissolution is far from the ‘extinction of personality’ recommended by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which came out two years after ‘Old Man’ appeared in An Annual of New Poetry. Eliot argued ...”

“... social psychologist Jonathan Haidt draws on an extensive range of evidence – rates of diagnosis, self-harm, suicide – to show the ways in which the mental health of young people has deteriorated. In the US between 2010 and 2018, self-reported anxiety rose by 18 per cent for those aged between 35 and 49, but by 92 per ...”

“... qualities he believed fine art to nourish. His own disquiet – confessed in the Sketch for a Self-Portrait (1941) – at having betrayed his early potential was thus assuaged by the much greater burden of guilt carried by the barbarian novicento, terrified of losing its cultural birthright, and grateful to Berenson for having carried the torch at ...”

“... body language, the poreholes in strawberries, cottonseed and cheesecloth. This poetry neither is self-consciously caressive of country matters nor uses its images to point to emotion or despair. It seems satisfied and sensible, with no origins in either personal or collective crisis – such things have been taken in its stride. Plath is of course a very ...”

“... of doom and epic feuds and ancestral violence, where human lives weren’t shaped by civilised self-acquaintance but by what he darkly called ‘powers we pretend to understand’. The ‘categorical question’ at stake is, as the title of one of Auden’s poems put it in exemplary fashion, ‘Which Side Am I Supposed to Be On?’The dilemma had ...”

“... in which a watersprite is grateful to a man for clearing out her ditches – and the almost self-parodic ‘Poem’:Love, I shall perfect for you the childWho diligently potters in my brainDigging with heavy spade till sods were piledOr puddling through muck in a deep drain.Fortunately, the going is not often so muddy, and the scale of Opened Ground ...”

“... That life should be an almost unsustainable struggle was an intrinsic part of Graham’s self-conception as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ...”

“... its heart growing more beautiful 20 under the meaning under the soft hands of its undoing (‘Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay’) This self-scrutinising frame-by-frame style was abandoned when continuous narrative memory was required for the autobiographical poems of Region of Unlikeness (1991). Memory oscillates (I ...”