“... is rendered chic by his gaze ... This was a Hollywood device during the great days of American self-flattery ... not a King but a whole nation was served the visible world on a platter, as if it were perfectly baked and glazed.’ The parallels Hollander draws make you see paintings and movies a little differently – and that little unglazes the eye to a ...”

“... of Lacan all along the line: he takes exception, for one thing, to Lacan’s ‘gloating, self-righteous “not-I-but-the-signifier” refrain’, which he likens to ‘the language of fundamentalism’ in seeming to impose a ‘supra-human authority’ on us as poor Speaking Subjects; and he seconds some of the arguments used by feminists against ...”

“... some nominated other. The challenge for the authors of Class War: A Decade of Disorder, as self-appointed bailiffs of a vanishing tribe, is to publish something more meaningful than a cover version of the rancid tabloids they so obviously model themselves upon. It is perhaps worth making it clear that Class War came into being as a loose federation of ...”

“... a private record of his spiritual experience. but one carefully selected by its subject for use in self-instruction. Others like Pliny provide us with letters, but only those written or selected for publication by the author, with the aim of impressing and instructing others. Mitchell has not, however, written a complete biography. As his title suggests, his ...”

“... nothing in the text to distinguish it from dozens of others scripted in the uniquely flatulent, self-congratulatory style of the late Brezhnev period.’ Yeltsin’s real test is yet to come. In the case of the man he finally succeeded in pushing out of office, Mikhail Gorbachev, the dossier is probably more or less complete. For a long time, Gorbachev was ...”

“... and courtiers who advise the sovereign can be forgiven for defending the monarchy so zealously and self-interestedly. Less excusable is the behaviour of the civil servants, especially Treasury grandees, whose job is supposedly to monitor public spending. But all too often, Hall claims, they have been only too eager to accommodate the sovereign’s ...”

“... research terrorist organisations. As he himself puts it, ‘this is an area of lies, deception and self-deception,’ with the inherent and ever-present personal danger of having to ask too many uncomfortable questions of those whose life’s work is to kill people. I recall a comment made by a member of a Loyalist paramilitary group to a journalist friend of ...”

“... Such things were greatly liked. In all this it can and should be said that Maclean’s tact and self-confidence, qualities which may rather seldom march together, were insistently available at the diplomatic-political level that counted, which was the level of Tito and his closest men, and may have been crucial at several ticklish points in liaison between ...”

“... once and for all the difficulties of his own nature. He had thought until then that he was self-sufficient, and he was not.’ The poems are so open, and yet, as Callow says, ‘he was a sly old man. Fiction, lying concealment, doubleness – that was the approach he favoured.’ ‘They used to say,’ he once told Horace Traubel, ‘that all the ...”

“... respect at all,’ his friend, Vic Francis, admitted. ‘He needed to make conquests, for his own self-esteem – but he had no respect for women, and would not put on any airs or pretensions for them.’ Jack had, indeed, no patience with women who made demands or difficulties. ‘Fuck these women and let’s get some others,’ he wrote to his closest ...”

“... schoolchildren and students entering adult literacy. But a good proportion must also be reaching self-improving readers. One of the weaknesses of the Orwellian model is its assumption that readers remain true to their class patterns all their lives. Many readers who like to think of themselves as cultivated will, I suspect, have followed the same sort of ...”

“... has cropped up so frequently in American mythology he has become an icon of the country’s self-divisions and betrayals. Jones doesn’t present Baggit sentimentally or symbolically; if his death is significant, it’s mainly because it happens to coincide with the news of Jim Morrison’s, on 9 July 1971. It is while brooding on his great idol’s ...”

“... began to be more keenly smelled’; thresholds of tolerance were lowered, and it became self-evident that something needed to be done about improving the situation. Corbin attributes this change in perception, in part at any rate, to the influence of scientific theory, but without suggesting that scientific theory was correct. Most of it was ...”

“... principally non-conformism. No child with a woman one doesn’t love. With a woman I love, her self-abandon seems to me infinitely more moving in this form.Paul Eluard: Why?André Breton: From a materialist angle, in the case of the woman I love, it is infinitely more pessimistic (law of shit) and consequently more poetic.Paul Eluard: Why, for ...”

“... author, Balzac appears as a monstre sacré, hypnotic and appalling by turns in his unpuncturable self-regard. He was a monster of excess, capable when he was behind on a deadline of writing day in day out for 18 hours out of the 24, and of sleeping for just as long in his intervals of exhaustion. If his complaining correspondence were to be believed, you ...”