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“... Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He is a difficult character to get into perspective. Most Australians who might be in a ...”

“... a pretty unlikely proposition. Coming second is a more reasonable ambition, because only your own self can really be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and ...”

“... headlong gallop into problems as complex and intractable as language, altruism, religion and human self-consciousness itself. The puzzling question about language, as Darwin observed, is why linguistic ability hasn’t evolved in other apes as well as humans. In both humans and other primates, there is a correlation between increasing group size and increasing ...”

“... it will not be possible to exonerate her from the ultimate charges of corruption and betrayal of self ... The genius is the only type of human whose agenda is pure enough for his [sic] motives to be incontrovertible. Lillie was not a genius.’ One of these women devoted her accidental gift of beauty to carving out a vivid, hectic and erratic life of her ...”

“... even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment’). The writing of an ‘Ode to ...”

“... refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident particular: ‘faux ...”

“... the sign of a primitive culture, we – this would seem to imply – have the novel; and the more self-consciously civilised among novelists have sometimes been anxious to disclaim the form’s own origins. As E.M. Forster wearily put it, ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ But storytelling will outlive the novel, and it is also elemental ...”

“... of Sennowe Park for Thomas Cook’s grandson. These houses were for social advancement, self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, where display meant more than beauty, opulence was preferred to taste, and wealth mattered more than lineage. Harold Nicolson explained: Edwardians were vulgar to a degree. They lacked style. They possessed only the ...”

“... literary property whose manifestations range from memorable poignancies of anguished belonging, self-division and loss, to a vulgar stereotype of vaguely dyspeptic graciousness, all mint-julep and magnolia and nagging resentful memories of old gallantries downtrodden. From Warren at his best, as from Faulkner, and the Allen Tate of The Fathers, we expect ...”

“... This is merely tiresome, it seems to me, as is the appearance of the wild entrepreneur John Self and the sober writer Martin Amis in Martin Amis’s Money. The real power of the thing is lost by sophisticated literary exploitation. A recent novel by C.J. Koch, The Doubleman, scores by showing a more simplistic and old-fashioned attitude. But ...”

“... since Descartes has accompanied scientific and material progress. Chase’s friend Eastman, the self-confident editor of the Lin Tin Bulletin, warns him of these dangers when Chase announces his plan to learn Chinese. Chase will lose all the formative influences (good and bad) that have fashioned his self, since they, and ...”

“... a joke too far’. FE’s life was shamelessly, successfully and simultaneously devoted to self-advancement, self-advertisement, self-indulgence and self-destruction, and he achieved more distinction in each of these fields than most men achieve ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal self-contradiction that fissures The Cantos: how, Olson ponders, could Pound be ‘in language and form as forward, as much the revolutionist as Lenin’, while in political, social and economic matters he was ‘as retrogressive as the Czar’? Olson’s own ...”

“... 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 ...”