“... Yeats valued Dante for that stylisation of conflict which he saw as leading to the security and ‘self-possession’ which great poetry must attain. In these ways Yeats sought Dantean power. ‘The supreme artist ... is the supreme intelligence. Like Dante he can pass through hell unsinged ... when he looks into the darkness, he sees.’ This ability ...”

“... much about informed, élite attitudes to Utopian ideas in this most recent phase of sustained and self-conscious development. There, however, the similarities end. Britain’s densely-researched book is a revised doctoral dissertation which views the Webbs with Webb-like detachment: Young’s account is longer but also slighter – an affectionate (if faintly ...”

“... and Kierkegaard in thinking mostly about other philosophers. They spent their lives detecting the self-deceptions into which their predecessors had fallen, in diagnosing their spurious claims to philosophical knowledge. This left them little time, or inclination, to speak to, or about, society. Sartre tried to combine the kind of writing about other ...”

“... and that the dialectic, ‘the consciousness of the form’, as he put it later, ‘of the inner self-movement of the content of thought’, in which everything that was merely finite was ‘negated’ and transcended and yet, even to the point of full knowledge of the absolute, preserved in its finitude, was the way in which to do so. The knowing subject ...”

“... Oddly, this means that the caricature of Englishness – the condition of being awkward, self-abasing, endlessly apologetic – is much closer to the experience of being English than you would expect from a caricature.Ian McEwan’s new novel is as English as they come. The ‘lessons’ of the title aren’t meant to be lessons in how to write an ...”

“... She hasn’t been to university, gives her inherited wealth away out of goodness and lack of self-regard, and doesn’t give a toss about her frizz. But I did care, and that Warwick girl cared enough to straighten hers. Not all the styling advice in the world, not even from Vogue, will ever persuade me not to straighten mine. The girl is there, at the ...”

“... I can still bear to reread without too much embarrassment.’ Bishop persisted with such dramatic self-doubt even after winning the Houghton Mifflin poetry award for her first collection, North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over ...”

“... which presented a loosely socialist outlook to the troops, while also envisioning a world of self-rule after the British had gone home. While he was stationed in Gibraltar, his first wife, Lynne, was assaulted by GIs, possibly miscarried, and certainly suffered a long-term gynaecological disorder as a result. She drank. He drank. They went to ...”

“... was still Sadism. Sade has attracted a bevy of Freudian biographers who have tried to explain his self-destructive course in terms of parental influence. This is unjustly reductive of a man whose temperament was so individual and whose behaviour was so resolutely self-invented. If one must seek a formative external ...”

“... moral ones. The Kantian view, that morality trumps other kinds of reason for action, is far from self-evident: it doesn’t follow from the idea that morality applies ‘categorically’ – in other words, that morality isn’t dependent on anything else. As Philippa Foot pointed out a long time ago, morality is no different in this respect from categorical ...”

“... show things as they are – bodies, pain, cancers, vomits, the gruesomeness of dying, the endless self-indulgence of memory – without letting anybody, least of all himself, escape into the cosy world of what he termed Dickensian fiction. Repeatedly he rebuked other novelists for failing to realise that James Joyce was the ‘Einstein of the novel’ and ...”

“... the most ticklish question of all, how to undo the disadvantages of the poor without denting their self-confidence and damaging their independence. In the wider world, our present agenda has an even more Gladstonian ring: the defence of human rights, the protection of small, faraway oppressed nations, the defeat of piracy and terrorism, the restoration of the ...”

“... notion of its contested nature might offer both Israelis and the rest of the world a practice of self-examination that would deprive historical agents of the authority of myth. The knowledge thus derived would act as a restraint on the opportunistic rhetoric of the politicians and the believers in a single-minded Zionism, and as a potential alternative to ...”

“... Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company ...”

“... between wallops at Updike’s Toward the End of Time (‘a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape’), took it on himself to be spokesman for the injured party. ‘I think the major reason so many of my generation dislike Mr Updike and the other G.M.N.s has to do ...”