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“... cynicism to mind, but Eça’s characters, unlike Flaubert’s, taste the bitterness of genuine self-knowledge – though they soon forget the taste again. In the agony of his eventual separation from Amelia, Amaro sets out to write her a poem in the lyrical form that he remembers from his student days, but all that he can manage is two stanzas: ‘It ...”

“... aroused in them by the work of their predecessors. The Victorians, she reminds us, already self-consciously thought of themselves as ‘modern’, and they were as obsessed with the problems of the subject, of representation and of the status of language as the 20th-century writers who followed them. Armstrong does not cite T.S. Eliot’s celebrated ...”

“... oral roots and point to a range of elaborate rhetorical displays which make much of conspicuous, self-advertising tropes as well as innuendo, illogical leaps, systematic lying, focus on a word’s sound rather than its meaning, ‘needling’, talking ‘around’ a subject, parody and pastiche. The dozens, or the ‘dirty dozens’, also operates as a kind ...”

“... and activities of Shabbetai Tzevi, or Sabbatai Zebi (1626-76), sage, scholar, mystic, apostate and self-proclaimed Messiah, an important figure in the history of Judaism, I must confess to knowing nothing until Bernice Rubens captured my interest in the remarkable existence and rum doings of one Sabbatai Zvi, holy roller, profligate, manic-depressive, loving ...”

“... outcome of this sequence of events, in the course of which Henry moves from tentative dimness to self-possession. In the book’s opening words, ‘Henry Farr did not, precisely, decide to murder his wife. It was simply that he could think of no other way of prolonging her absence from him indefinitely.’ But when the book closes, Henry faces this very ...”

“... the intentions behind her work enigmatic. One unfortunate but slightly comic consequence of this self-effacement was that she began to be confused with an American writer also named Dorothy Richardson, whose photograph kept haunting reviews of Pilgrimage. In exasperation, Richardson declared: ‘I think that about finishes me. I shall try advertisement ...”

“... made life digestible for me. You re-invigorated me, like a tonic bath. When I was groaning with self-pity, feeling all alone, I used to say to myself: ‘Look at him’ and I would get back to work with renewed energy, You were my supreme moral emblem, and my perpetual edification. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 November 1852: Bouilhet and I, we ...”

“... Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) presents, as White says in The Burning Library, ‘a gay hero so self-hating that even the most retrograde reader would become impatient with his inner torment and welcome with relief the Stonewall Uprising, which is the concluding scene in the novel’. The Farewell Symphony starts in 1994, and loops back into the early ...”

“... to think of Hardy as a contemporary of Eliot and Pound, a rooted but cosmopolitan writer, a self-taught craftsman and a poet. One of the best chapters is his discussion of Hardy the ‘laureate of engineering’, in which he suggests that technology, far from being something Hardy escaped, was a force he allowed to shape his aesthetic. Davie, like Pound ...”

“... 20th century. For Williams it was not a sleep exactly but a lurid dream, an unbroken series of self-aggrandising and self-justifying fantasies. And now for the Whopper of the Week, or if you prefer, the clearest symptoms of what Williams’s Dr Freud (‘One of the things I most enjoyed about Sigmund was his sense of ...”

“... In Professor Anscombe’s case at least, it is assumed that if there are such experiences they are self-intimating. What she seems to find questionable is whether they exist. However that may be, she assumes that, in the Goethe example, the only points at issue are whether he witnessed the events in question and did not need to be reminded of them. If these ...”

“... problem – though incredibly rich in some areas – was patchy, and blurred by a good deal of self-deception. He asked: what is the general structure and connection of human motives, including the unconscious as well as the conscious part of them? There is nothing wrong with this question, any more than with Darwin’s about the Origin of Species. Both ...”

“... reveal themselves to be tawdry bits of stuff, unspectacular to the point of ugliness outside the self-referring mirrors of the machine. So when John Lennon wrote and performed the prophetic early song ‘There’s a place’, it was not he but the group voice that was felt to be confiding ‘There’s a place where I can go / When I feel low, when I feel ...”

“... What will Ono do? Ishiguro gives a delicate and wholly convincing account of the evasions, the self-justifications and the pride of a man willing to bend with the breeze, but accustomed to a position of dignity. Through Ono’s mental detours, and the little hypocrisies of those around him – his daughters’ deferential and half-mocking manner towards ...”

“... Is there no room for pure thought or for free speculation? Indeed, is there not a whiff of self-contradictoriness in the notion that philosophy is merely the study of its own history? Students of the history of ancient philosophy may add a further complaint; for the scholarly studies of Gadamer and his disciples have received only sporadic acclaim ...”