“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... advancement of Christ’s Kingdom among Boys and the promotion of habits of Reverence, Discipline, Self-Respect and all that tends towards a true Christian manliness’. By 1900 the Brigade had attracted 75,000 boys and 409 officers, and had inspired comparable organisations among Jews, Catholics and Anglicans. The boys were offered a reasonably cheap ...”

“... they were always agents, often defeated but never passive victims bewildered by the new. Perhaps self-enabled by the ‘politics of mana’ which characterised the aggressive competitiveness of iwi culture, they took initiatives in greeting the new forces brought by the Europeans and appropriating them to their own perceived needs. They took to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... another’ is followed by twenty seconds of silence ‘and then a chaffinch starts and/then another’ is followed by another twenty seconds of silence ‘and starts and starts’. This allows Oswald to do what she has always wanted to do, which is to represent being in time, where things recur and repeat, and in which attempts to pause and linger on the moment get thwarted by the necessary flow of time ...”

“... bliss’, as Nabokov called it. It is a species of revelation, which includes self-revelation, by the most civilised means. That sounds portentous, but it may indicate something about the nature of inexplicably good moments in literary art, like Powell’s Widmerpool observing with approval: ‘Why, mother, you are wearing your bridge ...”