“... no! Not even to escape the pain, Debate and anguish that I underwent Flying from thee and my own self in vain With trouble wasted, till my strength all spent. I knew at last that thou or love or fate Had conquered and repentance was too late. The idea of a forbidden love also came to Lady Gregory in another poem, not part of the sonnet sequence, written as ...”

“... Auden, ‘of which the ending is only a cloudy vision at present’.He had a gift for startling self-exposure: ‘The frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating,’ Julian Symons wrote. John Lehmann said he was ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person’ he had ever met. In an ...”

“... itself remarkably capable of coming to terms with apparent threats to its traditional values and self-image. From Leavis to American deconstruction, the story that Eagleton has to tell is one of successive accommodating moves between the literary-academic ‘institution’ and those critics, schools or ideas which begin by challenging its cultural ...”

“... difference comes down to in the end is the question of how far texts can be treated as autonomous, self-sufficient verbal artefacts. Riffaterre is at one with Brooks and Wimsatt – not to mention Aristotle and his formalist descendants – in believing that they must be so treated if poems are to retain any kind of enduring significance. He doesn’t, of ...”

“... Königsberg, the young people of Jena were convinced that a post-Kantian future of autonomous self-creation belonged to them. Before long August and Caroline Schlegel also settled in Jena, followed by Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel. Then Hölderlin arrived, and in 1798 his brilliant young friend Schelling – a 23-year-old professor with an irresistible ...”

“... reading of the new enemy and therefore to its decision to launch an ineffectual, misdirected and self-defeating counterattack. Third, the neo-con democratisation project, having become a widely publicised justification for the invasion after the fact, makes assumptions about the nature of the threat that clash with the basic theoretical framework of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... may well have developed your symptoms himself. Hypochondria is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought – worrying enough to raise the pulse rate – that nurses and doctors are an elite, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Trolls​ are the self-styled pranksters of the internet, a subculture of wind-up merchants who will say anything they can to provoke unwary victims, then delight in the outrage that follows. When Mitchell Henderson, a 12-year-old boy from Minnesota, killed himself in 2006, trolls descended on his MySpace page, where his friends and relatives were posting tributes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nobody’s fool. Even further, they suggest an unaggressive sensuality, the deep pleasure of a self-contained bodily ease that demands no sacrifice of decorum nor startling exoticism to be immediately compelling. Chanel is rightly more admired as a stylistic innovator than as a genius of pure couture. To a certain extent, her sartorial achievements were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”