“... and which he reiterates throughout the book. Europeans are now Kantians, seeking to inhabit ‘a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation’. The United States, by contrast, ‘remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable’. He goes on ...”

“... be time to retire this little observation. Like Dave Eggers, Smith is interested in contemporary self-consciousness. Insofar as she is a moralist, she is a moralist about this. She is always pointing out that her characters, on the brink of a momentous access of feeling, are undermined by their sense that they are not being original, that TV has preceded ...”

“... revolution has a photograph of Blithe Spirit on the cover. Mindful of Coward’s 1961 plea to the self-expressive young playwrights of the Royal Court school to ‘consider the public’, Rebellato charts the ways in which the post-’56 Court disempowered the audience, from the abolition of the writer’s curtain call (at which the audience could boo) to the ...”

“... was supposedly un-American in its embrace of Third World Marxism, its call for armed black self-defence, its celebration of a separate, distinctive black culture, and its call for ‘offing the pigs’ and overthrowing white supremacist ‘AmeriKKKa’. In this version of civil rights history, angry black militants alienated the very whites who they ...”

“... even during the emergency – many extreme measures should remain off-limits. Nevertheless, the self-conscious design of an emergency regime may well be the best available defence against a panic-driven cycle of permanent destruction. One thing only is clear. There is no chance of a carefully modulated response unless we take some critical distance from the ...”

“... abiding subject, addressed in novel after novel – is the hoax of Australian identity, and its self-tortured relationship with the rest of the world. The narrator of Illywhacker, Herbert Badgery, is a self-confessed liar and conman who discovers, while in prison, a history of Australia by M.V. Anderson (Carey’s ...”

“... structured to suit men, preferably men with stay-at-home wives. The qualities rewarded there – self-reliance, ambition, single-minded devotion to work – make women unfit for marriage and vice versa. By the time they are ready to settle down, their male contemporaries are married or looking for younger, softer women; if it’s not too late for a ...”

“... 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms. Thus we see a rectangular firewall of gilt mouldings isolating a bucolic vista from the surrounding whitewash. The landscape is distanced – a hillside looked down on, its little ...”

“... fashionable clutter, there reigned ‘a sober solemnity … a softened and subdued light illumined self-communion’. Rapture was only achieved through unrelenting physical effort, to the point of exhaustion, expressive less of passion than of rage. Delacroix’s building had been a gymnasium, and Baudelaire imagined him locked in athletic combat with the ...”

“... here means ‘doing, attempt’ or even ‘attack’, and so is gently nudging the verbal self-indulgence and inaction of an ‘essay’ towards military action. Guilt and pleasure are often codependent addictions, but for early modern authors the two were inextricable. The pedant offered the pleasure of verbal excess along with a guilty ...”

“... the individual, honour was understood as a quality with interior and exterior aspects, a form of self-esteem requiring constant confirmation from the community. The honourable man sought to be generous, honest, elegant, courteous and courageous, and to be known for possessing these qualities. If a man could not think of himself as honourable, he could not ...”

“... rather two), ‘there is no meaning but something like a dream of meaning.’ Snatches of self-reflexive commentary are scattered throughout: The sentences not only undergo the normal deprivation of their intrinsic value and communication capacity but acquire acceleration and a centripetal and centrifugal force at the same time. It’s obvious that ...”

“... people and a few stray hippies, putting it all together with a poem by Allen Ginsberg in a self-published book. Rineke Dijkstra’s large-format full-length portraits of girls in Liverpool in 1995 announce a sudden shift in scale. Dressed for a night out at the Buzz Club they stand fidgety and self-conscious, not ...”

“... this, holding out against the dread prospect of statutory regulation. However, several bits of self-serving chaff get thrown into the picture here. One is the idea that journalists, as self-styled talkers of truth to power, should be above the law – the law against bribing the police, for example, or breaching ...”

“... be the intention, or part of it, though it would be foolish to claim to know what motivates such self-disfigurement. From the outside, however, he looks like a ghoul, a monstrous apparition, the Ghost of Celebrity Future. As he sang in ‘Thriller’, ‘Night creatures call/And the dead start to walk in their masquerade/There’s no escaping the jaws of the ...”