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“... would take the frequent changes of course as vacillations, Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s self-corrections as a healthy sign of learning from temporary mistakes without deviating from a central direction. Foucault himself says here that the theme of his research was always the subject (and, surprisingly, not power): that is, how human beings ...”

“... many times that it is hard to remember the first time as an isolated event’ – and many of her self-contained paragraphs note stratagems for order in the unstable behaviour of a group whose period of exile, as one of them sharply says, ‘is a waste of time’. Lisa St Aubin de Teran is a fine writer, and her subtle prose looks best when it ...”

“... which he shares with the ideologues he is attacking seems to me to reflect a collective stupor of self-esteem so pervasive and naïve as to be likely to neutralise any intellectual defences against political brutalism. It would not surprise me if the institutionalisation of criticism as an autonomous and self-validating ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... of writers.’ Schaberg’s book is a deliberately narrow study, rich in its suggestiveness, self-indulgent in its minutiae, regrettable in its flaws. He is censorious of the few who made earlier attempts at this kind of reconstruction; he records their tiny errors, missing commas and the like. His own book, however, is marred by mistranslations, by ...”

“... of the great specialists like Rafael Santos Torroella or Dawn Ades, let alone to the artist’s self-assessment as an impotent, infantile perverse polymorph and a bit of a monster. Take the 1942 autobiography, The Secret Lift of Salvador Dalí, written to seal his rebirth into the post-Republican family of power. It was ...”

“... which had been founded in 1925. Not all of them saw themselves primarily as nationalist, or sought self-government for Wales, but, as King shows, they were densely interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and ...”

“... politics and nature. Instead Huxley started to search for a more timeless and ‘disembodied’ self. The gap between Huxley and his garish new world seems to have made this transition possible. Huxley opens After Many a Summer, the first novel he wrote in California, with a description of the sprawling landscape of Beverly Hills, seen through the ...”

“... of the militants but not of the constitutionalists, while Atkinson, mirroring the militants’ self-absorption, pretty much ignores the constitutionalists altogether. The movement deserves more hard-headed scrutiny: we should ask what it meant, for politics and for women themselves, for the claim to political equality to burst on the scene through the ...”

“... actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ‘experimental’. A poem, Fisher said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a ...”

“... way that’s clever and distanced but also consciously intense, with giving voice to parts of the self that not everyone puts on display. There are other similarities: a provincial city – Naples, Newark – that functions as the centre of the universe; an emphasis on the struggle between anarchic self-expression and the ...”

“... decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the ...”

“... a lot of time distancing himself from contemporary poets and poetry, and particularly from their self-importance as bringers of news that was not news. He was interested in whether there was a good way of taking oneself seriously; and what, if anything, this had to do with the writing of poetry. The Lake Poets’ mistake, in Byron’s view, was to use nature ...”

“... the billionaires take to calling themselves the Meliorists, Nader has apparently abandoned the self-defeating dogma that the worse things get, the better they get: he aims instead to chart incremental progress towards an alternative politics. The results are mixed. Despite its noble intentions, this 733-page book is a trial to read. The writing is by turns ...”