“... is specialised (and not my specialism), but by this she means that the gentleman is not ‘self-divided’ – not, that is, torn between reason and emotion, the ideal and the actual. For the Trollopian gentleman-hero, there is no oscillation between the here and now and the remote and what should be: the world is of a piece. The benightedly ...”

“... and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer’s self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country: The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon ...”

“... that makes these poems so very demanding and difficult. While the language is charged with the self-awareness that distinguishes poetic language, these poems are not primarily self-reflective. When poetry is in some sense the subject, the process is more one of self-interrogation. The ...”

“... vulgarian, punning and burping his way through high society. But Hildesheimer’s way with this self-imposed assignment has none of these depressing features. He admires Mozart above all other humans: in fact, he concludes his book calling him ‘an unearned gift to humanity, nature’s unique, unmatched, and probably unmatchable work of art’. He wants to ...”

“... of Beaconsfield, and confidant of the Queen. In poem after poem Byron had revealed the histrionic self-doubt and sense of evil which had goaded him from one extravagant action to another; he had then moved on to the wonderfully truth-revealing irresponsibility and mischief of Don Juan. The result? A European-wide reputation, and one great poem, certainly: but ...”

“... have no doubt tended to think that Kabbalism encourages superstition, emotionalism and self-indulgence. Much the same could be said of the flower people of the 1960s, who were also hankering after forms of religion with a dash of oriental extravagance about them. It was a suspect strain in Bloom, that his Kabbalism met the emotionalism of the ...”

“... arm of a heavily beringed dress designer: a man, it appears, of active sensuality verging on self-indulgence. Now compare the Irving Penn photograph for the back jacket of Music for Chameleons. Emaciated fingers delicately support a frail skull: without their help, you feel, the head might simply snap off. One hand, indeed, supplies the vertical ...”

“... type of novelist (and had something of the same order of talent) as the Old Firm, writers whose self-conscious dandy persona pervades their work, who cannot detach their own personality from the world they have created, who, indeed, are always in danger in real life of being swallowed by their creations. With Kennaway, though the rhythms tend to be ...”

“... even a public deceitfulness, but rather that the high-minded propounders of liberal ideals, the self-satisfied advocates of ‘procrustean virtue’, as he occasionally puts it, are self-deceived. But, once more, if that implies, as it surely must, that they are blinded to the reality of the world, then we need a rather ...”

“... and that notoriety tends to deter readers who might have tried, so that the legend is self-perpetuating. On all sides, it is acknowledged as some sort of masterpeice, but it is clear that not all who praise have actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted ...”

“... any rate. Yet his conclusion is caustic: In the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality ... Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact – with a ...”

“... obsessed with violence and with his own homosexuality, but also a sophisticated, ironic and self-consciously art-historical artist. Can we accept this? According to Van Mander’s account, ‘after a fortnight’s work’ Caravaggio would ‘sally forth for a couple of months at a time with his rapier at his side and his page behind him going from one ...”

“... of “Man” with that of the “subject”, which is gendered, “decentred”, and no longer self-determining.’ Yet it seems we go on believing in the feasibility of a decent life, although its rationale must be hard to formulate, let alone justify: certainly nothing worthy (thank God, some will say) of being called an ideology. We believe (which may ...”

“... however, until the First World War turned a broadly benevolent indifference into interest and self-interest, then into irritation, and finally into apprehension that The American Cancer (a title of 1931) threatened the French way of life. The war had bled France white, economic crisis had destabilised it further. The French began to question ...”

“... Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable ...”