Search Results

“... one in which the great scientific and literary figures are outnumbered by chancers, eccentrics and self-publicists, Holmes escapes the familiar Romantic canon and reveals the spirit of the age from fresh perspectives. If the story amounts to a chronicle of failures they are nonetheless unpredictable and sometimes delightful failures. An attempt at the altitude ...”

“... by her gender and class, persuaded her that she had found a vocation. Those who knew her as a self-effacing girl would have been astonished to learn that she became the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and a forceful figure in the gradual development of higher education for women. Sutherland’s book is mainly about her achievements, and ...”

“... and developing its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked young Spartan ...”

“... way necessary to his agitated soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet ...”

“... the unmatchedly lively letters and journals, the funniest and most consistently readable extended self-portrait in the English language. Byron’s case, however, is exceptional. Perhaps no other project of authorial self-invention has been as successful – though there is a paradox here, because these ...”

“... are at present under heavy philosophical battering, including the very idea of a stable inner ‘self’ and of a universally knowable ‘human nature’, and they deconstruct quite nicely under the Derridean wrecking ball. The Enlightenment was undoubtedly a mode of control, with its own orthodoxies. What needs to be emphasised at the moment, however, is ...”

“... the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned ...”

“... goes, the first volume of her autobiography, would be hard to better as a portrait of her young self or of any other bright young thing in that generation. As a writer she had energy, verbal invention, natural comic timing and a fastidious ear which would have ruled out the possibility of her ever using, as Mr Ziegler does, such a cloddish term as ...”

“... Berryman and Lowell were the great contemporary narrators, compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P. Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. Such poetry invented the ...”

“... is a fact of the matter, not the whole truth of it. Mailer here has better things to do with his self than to attend to it or upon it. You could call the book a feat of self-abnegation if the word ‘feat’ didn’t suggest a bravura. Gilmore, who had no self-control once he had decided ...”

“... namely, you. Ethics, however, Peter Singer begins his argument by declaring, transcends individual self-interests. Indeed, he locates the early stirrings of ethical thought in what he calls ‘the “Golden Rule” attributed to Moses’, which ‘tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and “do unto others as we would have them do unto ...”

“... unremarked by Anglo-American opponents who assume that no Frenchman has ever paid attention to a self-respecting ‘logical’ argument.) The operative concept is that which distinguishes ‘proper’ from ‘common’ names, the former marked out by the fact that they refer directly to some unique individual (person, object or event). With common names, on ...”

“... lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier lyrics and frames them in a prose narrative that supplies formal criticism as well as autobiographical context. It also reveals Dante’s deep ...”

“... at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but parturition and potato-peeling’, ‘toiling on in the faith that a reward was … in heaven’.The religious sensibility that led ...”

“... theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less of its self-effacing eagerness to fit in. Or rather I saw Hamlet not in the Ivan Franko Music and Drama Theatre but under it. The theatre’s ambitious artistic director, Rostislav Derzhypilsky, had discovered that beneath the public areas of the building there was a ...”