“... of a child. Smoothed from the national laundry is a crease. The penguin. Its raised beak. Its self-important air. An advice bird. Rising trumpets lift up through shafts of attic sunlight. Sound-motes. The air is soothed. Chords on dusty keys. There she goes! Straight as a die! Tantara! (ii) A press of the old against the young, craning their necks to ...”

“... Something goes away and something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of                      one. But patiently you travel it. Your self. You hardly disturb anything actually, isn’t it strange. For all ...”

“... one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the heroic line, are not self-evidently one. Making them converge requires the critic to find heroic lines embedded within prose works (he finds a lot of them, some less heroic than others) and even to make sonnets from heroic lines embedded in the novels of Mailer. Heroic conduct treads ...”

“... town like ’s-Hertogenbosch stormed by Turkish troops. ‘The demonic siege of the Christian self,’ Koerner comments, ‘thus expands to encompass the entire ecumene.’ It continues in the present, and not only in the perceived Muslim threat to Europe, as Koerner details in a bravura reading of Adoration of the Magi (c.1490-1500). In this ‘decisive ...”

“... in horror as a country they admired for its pragmatism and sangfroid fell into pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion.I gleaned two new facts on my way to see the Old Masters at the Gemäldegalerie. One was that ‘the imperative to open windows’ is now part of many Berlin rental agreements. The other was that opera venues, keen to get up and running, will only ...”

“... The War allowed me to project, – to EMBODY, – an ultimate ‘aspect’ of the ‘self’ … Such extreme typesetting reflects extreme states of mind: the speaker here is the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, depicted in 1919 as he goes mad. If you read the books in order you will also learn early on about Bidart’s early life. Raised far from ...”

“... The book discusses the relationship between ‘the star’ and ‘the fan’, the critic being a self-conscious version of the latter. Lawrence considers how we read a performance, a face, but more how we respond to it. Clift is the test case for her arguments, and given the complexities of his career and fame, he proves to be a very good one. In his first ...”

“... isn’t, properly speaking, something that happens to us. It is, rather, the nullification of the self as experiencing subject. How then can death be a bad thing for the person who dies? What is there to be afraid of? We tend to speak of ‘the fear of death’ as if it were a single particular thing, but that is to obscure the diverse terrors death ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat ...”

“... same pattern: Carrère takes a character or set of characters and through lengthy digressions and self-reflection finds something both personal and universal in their struggles. He likes to call his books ‘non-fiction novels’ and cites In Cold Blood as his inspiration. But Truman Capote, who used the term himself, always stressed the author’s ...”

“... well as a transcendental aspect. ‘For Lawrence,’ Jacques Berthoud speculates valiantly, ‘the self has a centre, which is the subjective life of the body, and a circumference, which is the outgoing life of the mind.’3 Lawrence felt that mind and body do not settle into a fixed relation, but rather interfere constantly in each other’s designs. In ...”

“... Despite all its limitations and ambiguities, the Declaration of Principles for Palestinian self-government in Gaza and Jericho marked a major breakthrough in the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In one stunning move, Arafat and Rabin have redrawn the geopolitical map of the region. The Arab-Israeli divide was one not merely between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, but also between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism ...”

“... government never moved too far out of contact with the governed and that the masses would grow in self-reliance. Society would then be in every respect self-governing: it would spontaneously generate its own orderliness, and government’s role would diminish almost to vanishing point. Between 1868 and 1900 the smallest ...”

“... Vox is also profoundly erotic. For Baker, an author fantastically alert to ‘the whole problem of self-repetition and self-influence’, both form and content are a departure. His three previous books had approached ever nearer to autobiography, as though taking literally Nabokov’s dictum that writing is ‘a gradually ...”

“... rather maddening. As revealed in his letters he comes across to me as vain, attitudinising and self-dramatising, self-obsessed yet – to the very end – with very little in the way of self-knowledge. I can see there must be something wrong with this reaction, and for the good reason ...”