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Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life 
by Herman Pleij, translated by Diane Webb.
Columbia, 544 pp., £23.50, June 2001, 0 231 11702 7
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... Little exaggeration is required to describe this as a bulimic society, one bent on extremes of self-abnegation and indulgence, which allowed scant opportunity for a dispassionate attitude towards food. Medieval people don’t seem to have behaved as rationally as Parzifal did and the absence of any judicious decision-making about food consumption raises a ...

A Year upon the Sofa

Dinah Birch, 8 May 1997

Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists 
by Valerie Sanders.
Macmillan, 249 pp., £42.50, September 1996, 0 333 59563 7
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... and rational woman persuade herself to oppose a cause from which she has gained so much? Is it self-hatred, or misguided self-interest? Craven subservience to men, or mean-minded jealousy of the success of other women? Understandably, feminist scholars have often preferred to focus on the onward march of ...

We stop the words

David Craig: A.L. Kennedy, 16 September 1999

Everything you need 
by A.L. Kennedy.
Cape, 567 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 224 04433 8
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... a few years before he disappeared into a Stalinist labour camp. A taboo on such material, whether self or socially imposed, would inflict its own kind of moral injury. For a start we should concentrate on the excellence or otherwise of the art with which the dreadful material is rendered, and A.L. Kennedy is a virtuoso of prose. Her phrasing is fine-tuned and ...

‘Life has been reborn’

Karl Schlögel: Writing Diaries under Stalin, 16 August 2007

Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin 
by Jochen Hellbeck.
Harvard, 436 pp., £19.95, May 2007, 978 0 674 02174 7
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... in German with a commentary by him several years ago.) The entire diary is an exercise in self-observation, as Podlubny works on and overcomes his old self. He knows what happened in the villages during the deportations of millions of peasants and in the Great Famine. But he is merciless: All in all, what’s ...

At the National Gallery

Clare Bucknell: Artemisia, 4 March 2021

... of the artist’s studio become theatre props, and the gold-fringed curtain fabric becomes eerily self-referential, recalling its use ten years earlier to represent a velvet throw on Holofernes’ bed.Artemisia, who understood – and relied on – the fact that male collectors were liable to see her face and body behind each Judith, Cleopatra or ...

Anglo-Irish Occasions

Seamus Heaney, 5 May 1988

... by civil servants from Westminster and Dublin in an attempt to provide a new, more responsive and self-justifying mechanism for concession or complaint or suasion on either side. What was called ‘the spirit of the agreement’ seemed to require and sponsor a candid coming and going between the domains of Britishness and Irishness. It seemed to allow ...

Short Cuts and Half Cuts

Luke Kennard: ‘Early Work’, 20 June 2019

Early Work 
by Andrew Martin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.50, July 2019, 978 1 250 21501 7
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... out other people’s crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite.’ Self-aware to the point of self-loathing, Pete attributes his personality to being ‘raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and the help of others, but to also ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... of moral education. Aristotle started from the premise that ‘the good man should be a lover of self,’ and Jesus took the next step with the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In the beginning – the assumption goes – you care for nobody except yourself; but then, all being well, your selfishness will start to expand. Through the ...
The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Blackwell, 480 pp., £25, December 1996, 0 631 18746 4
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Coleridge: Selected Poems 
edited by Richard Holmes.
HarperCollins, 358 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 00 255579 4
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Coleridge’s Later Poetry 
by Morton Paley.
Oxford, 147 pp., £25, June 1996, 0 19 818372 0
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A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse 
edited by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 232 pp., £7.99, March 1996, 0 571 17604 6
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... functioned as the psychic, literary and physical equivalent of an auto-immune disease, a morbid self-misrecognition or mutant Socratism in which self-knowledge is disabling and identification toxic. ‘In exact proportion to the importance and urgency of any Duty was it, as of a fatal necessity, sure to be neglected ...

Where did he get it?

P.N. Furbank, 3 May 1984

Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle 
by Zdzislaw Najder, translated by Halina Carroll-Najder.
Cambridge, 647 pp., £19.50, February 1984, 0 521 25947 9
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Conrad under Familial Eyes 
edited by Zdzislaw Najder, translated by Halina Carroll-Najder.
Cambridge, 282 pp., £19.50, February 1984, 9780521250825
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... Yeats’s notion of the anti-self or Mask, his theory that creativity is a matter of constructing a dream-identity antithetical to the natural self and the natural world, seems to me very profound and helpful – in fact, just true. ‘A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named “himself” ...

The Shock of the Old

Adam Phillips, 10 February 1994

Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience 
by Christopher Bollas.
Routledge, 294 pp., £14.99, April 1993, 0 415 08815 1
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Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory 
by Malcolm Bowie.
Blackwell, 161 pp., £35, October 1993, 0 631 18925 4
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... sometimes in his overwriting). When, for example, he says about the process of observing the self as an object, ‘emerging from self-experience proper, the subject considers where he has been’, it is integral to the process being described that we can hear the cadence of Coleridge’s glosses on ‘The Ancient ...

Wringing out the Fault

Stephen Sedley: The Right to Silence, 7 March 2002

... have taken it on themselves to exclude unfairly obtained admissions of guilt; and this self-conferred power has been raised to a higher-order principle by a statutory requirement in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to exclude confession evidence which the Crown cannot prove to have been obtained in circumstances which cast no serious doubt on ...

Fellow Genius

Claude Rawson, 5 January 1989

The Poems of John Oldham 
edited by Harold Brooks and Raman Selden.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, February 1987, 0 19 812456 2
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... Farewel, too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron ...

Body History

Roy Porter, 31 August 1989

The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture 
by Dorinda Outram.
Yale, 197 pp., £22, May 1989, 0 300 04436 4
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Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories 
by Barbara Gates.
Princeton, 190 pp., £19.95, September 1988, 0 691 09437 3
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Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the 18th and 20th Centuries 
by Ludmilla Jordanova.
Harvester, 224 pp., £19.95, April 1989, 9780745003320
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Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen 
by Jeanne Peterson.
Indiana, 241 pp., $39.95, May 1989, 0 253 20509 3
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... scholars. Yet, with the lessons of ‘women’s studies’ in mind, their authors aim to avoid self-immolation within yet another specialist ghetto. Body history must be part of big history. It must display the body as the inexhaustible generator of representations for society at large, and as a crossroads of power, the new pineal gland mediating between ...

Deconstructing America

Sheldon Rothblatt, 23 July 1992

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature 
by Stephen Fender.
Cambridge, 400 pp., £40, April 1992, 0 521 41175 0
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... The topic of national self-regard falls under the general historical heading of ‘exceptionalism’ – where claims are made as to the unique quality of national experience, or ‘character’. The two are usually connected. How a nation views its elementary virtues or basic inclinations is obviously significant ...

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