“... to mediate fact and value, objective and subjective, as the young Marian Evans abandons her early self-punitive Evangelicism to consort with fashionable Coventry freethinkers. For Matthew Arnold, it is culture which will inherit the ideological role of religion in sustaining a corporate faith; but Arnold’s ‘culture’ is altogether too lofty and nebulous ...”

“... of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as ...”

“... himself had scrawled, and then crossed out, on the cover of his manuscript notebook. Eliot’s self-satirising title is comparable to his first, Dickensian, title for The Waste Land – ‘He do the police in different voices.’ Such mocking inscriptions exemplify the way in which he invoked his satiric self against his ...”

“... no tale of emancipation here – feminist historians have shown that within patriarchy this is a self-serving male illusion; and no well-worn labels either. The book’s subject, then, is ‘writings dedicated to imparting to the public teachings about sex – together with their authors, contexts and impacts’. And the story Porter and Hall tell is fairly ...”

“... meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage’. And whether he was thought to be confused and self-deceiving, or vacuous, or even crazy, Crane was such a troubling figure, both before and after his early death, that people were inclined to describe his poetry in a way that cast aspersions on his character; as though such unapproachable poems could only be ...”

“... of her dancing on stage, with snapshots of her among friends and admirers, the show recaptures the self-knowingly playful acrobatics and the heart-stopping clothed elegance of this unthreatening sexual being, a femme vitale but not fatale. How uncanny to find her exhibited in a space that normally serves as an auction house. Josephine Baker for sale: what is ...”

“... seven Wanderjähre around Europe while he tried to be an artist, and pondered the nature of the ‘self’, the ‘I’ and the ‘ego’ in his diary; and then – Vienna. Homburger/Erikson began his psychoanalytic career with a chance tutoring job in the family of Anna Freud’s friend Dorothy Burlingham. He was good with children and highly perceptive, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the threat of a violent outside. It was Cowper who declared, with something between innocence and self-accusation, that in his retreat (itself both a place achieved, and the act of retreating) ‘the sound of war/ Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me.’ Thus he records his strange kinship with those present-day authors who – like Don DeLillo – pose the ...”

“... time with people I don’t really want to see,’ he writes, always a little charmed by his own self-contempt. At other times he admonishes himself to ‘make something out of the experience; discipline and train myself. Not run around to parties getting drunk and looking for “consolation”.’ But running round to parties and getting drunk is what he ...”

“... by the civilised life.’ Maybe any such talk of ‘civilisation’ is liable to sound pompous and self-important, but the more we listen to ‘Uncle Wiz’, the more wistfully we recall his younger self who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman ...”

“... wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and says she doesn’t have a family. Sure, she’s got talent, but something is chasing her and giving her the fear, the reason, the drive. Even at this early stage in the narrative, you detect the clumsy fingers of a bad male ...”

“... truth’. Rose is also compellingly readable on the Stevenson biography, and its bizarre trio of self-exculpating and condemnatory appendixes by three Plath ‘friends’. There was obviously something about Plath that stung people who knew her into frantic self-justification. Rose asks: ‘What it is on Plath’s part ...”