“... tone, which will slowly become that of the last five years of Wilde’s life. It is petulant and self-pitying; it lacks all the style, irony and sense of mischief which Wilde had been working on for twenty years. It is as though he has ceased to be the Platonic conception of himself and become Sir William Wilde’s son, full of his own importance and only ...”

“... at, a sequence of embodied apparitions’. Lowell, needless to say, transforms Prometheus into a self-doubting intellectual, wracked less by his chains and the eagle than by moral anxieties about his own obsessional and transgressive behaviour: ‘I think I should have been more loyal to the idiocy of things,’ he tells the Daughters of Ocean, who function ...”

“... of the uncanny was to haunt a violent century in which emphatic distinctions would be made between self and others, friends and enemies, compatriots and strangers. When the familiar and the unfamiliar can’t be clearly distinguished, thrones and altars start to tremble. Who is my friend and who is not? What are the duties or practical implications of ...”

“... think. But no: his widow continues to abide by her wedding vows, and in a far from happy ending, self-imposed constancy prevails over love. Where is the biographical resonance? Nicolas Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa does have a vaguely aristocratic (Hungarian) background, and he did recently marry a woman of reputedly rare beauty. It was, however, wife number ...”

“... on Alcatraz. San Francisco prides itself on being a liberal place to live, but the urge to self-destruction saw the bridge and recognised destiny. There are still disputes about whether to build a ‘suicide barrier’ on the bridge or whether to leave the decision to the person who spends an hour gazing at the water below. That’s where the drama ...”

“... this means that Iraqis secretly don’t want the occupation forces to leave at all. This kind of self-deception leads to American commentators speaking of the extent and timing of US troop withdrawal as if it were purely an American decision, to be decided by the outcome of the presidential election. One of the few US commentators to have an understanding of ...”

“... the provincial.’ And, the Soviet filmmaker was too polite to add, America the racist, the self-righteous and the white supremacist. The depiction of the entire Civil War is merely a prelude to the madness of the movie’s final hour: an orgy of arson and rape, anarchy, revolution and counter-revolution, human sacrifice and hair’s-breadth rescue, the ...”

“... to hang themselves in 2003 alone – authorities log these under the heading ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’. Fletcher and Stover are worried by the rapid erosion of the Army Field Manual ‘guiding rule’ that no interrogator should use a technique he or she would not want used on a US soldier. Yet, as they recall early on, many of the ...”

“... of her working days, her pursuit of fame, had made her inflexible: she was eccentric, implacable, self-absorbed. Love, which calls for compliance, resilience, lavishness, would be a shock to her spirit, an upset to the rhythm of her days. She would never achieve it, he was sure. For all the love in her books, it would be beyond her in her life. For years ...”

“... oddly social-anthropological character of both these accounts: evocations of a way of life that self-consciously represented the values of solidarity and community, and that required a measure of continuity – and thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s ...”

“... consolation. Science’s chilling reports on the material world were not what the spiritual self, hungry for order, purpose and transcendent value, wanted to hear. At some point in the 19th century, the natural sciences became more or less synonymous with knowledge as such, and the arts were faced with a choice. On the one hand, they could simply refuse ...”

“... of confidence aggravated existing disagreements between traditionalists in the leadership and the self-styled modernisers who took their line from the Italian Communist Party. The eventual split was less dramatic than the break with the Provos had been: the violence was strictly rhetorical. The Democratic Left took with it most of the political capital the ...”

“... thesis, based on many other examples, that Carthage was essential to Rome’s own development and self-image. According to legend, both great powers were founded in the same year, 753 BC. By insisting that Carthage inculcated its children with eternal hatred of Rome and made them vow to destroy it, Romans justified their own compulsion to crush Carthage as ...”

“... it, but in his search discovers that the bomb is merely a metaphor symbolising his own fuming self. In the final scene, he jumps into the Hudson and drowns; the city is saved. Metaphysics, if it can be defined at all, is highbrow gimmickry, while genre literature was until recently the lowest of the low. For writers they represent two opposing drives: the ...”

“... day when, as a boy fighting in the Russian Civil War, he killed (or thought he killed) a man in self-defence. The man was blond and handsome, on a beautiful white horse; the narrator was tired and ugly, riding a black nag. (Gazdanov’s protagonists often shared his characteristics. His fellow émigré Vasily Yanovsky described him as ‘a stocky fellow ...”