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“... books, among them 13 novels, Prose is frighteningly good at portraying the fears, affectations and self-delusions of her protagonists: the roles they play to sustain themselves, and the roles they play in front of others. At faculty dinners she tells us that ‘Swenson cherished those moments’ when people misunderstood his wife’s jokes, ‘for making him ...”

“... of the piece is the negativism of fashionable thinking about the current state of England: healthy self-criticism, Allison objects, has become debilitating self-denigration. Chief offenders are those in the communications media for painting current affairs in the blackest colours. One industry whose decline Allison ardently ...”

“... worlds’ and that ‘a nascent culture of simulation is affecting our ideas about mind, body, self and machine.’ Moreover, she believes that the changes she is tracking, far from being isolated, are part of a general change in the way we live and think. The context in which the culture of simulation must be understood is that ‘of the eroding ...”

“... a more illuminating form of reflective distance from our concepts and values through historical self-consciousness, which is an immersion in contingency. The history of philosophy itself is one part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that ...”

“... of influence with regard to early versions of yourself, as if, to twist Harold Bloom, your early self now played an insurmountably glorious Milton to your later romantic phases? Did Shakespeare say to himself: ‘No way I can beat Hamlet, so why write again?’ Jon Elster wrote two gems in the 1970s and 1980s, Ulysses and the Sirens and Sour Grapes. Not that ...”

“... assault and unlawful assembly. A columnist for the Oakland Tribune called the rioters ‘self-described anarchists’ and ‘wannabe Black Panthers’. The revolt in the aftermath of Grant’s murder is reminiscent of a bygone era in Oakland and other cities across the United States when black radicals enraged by police misconduct fearlessly ...”

“... often in the earlier fiction) he can seem to betray himself, not in the sense of giving his true self away, but the reverse. He tends to present experiences close to his own life through an irony so thick that it could serve in the place of the traditional disclaimer that ‘Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.’ The ...”

“... Some of Lawrence’s earliest paintings are self-portraits in the mould of Courbet – the painter as Artist. Latterly the role was deepened in its tragic aspect, the artist as Marsyas flayed. Lawrence’s gift to us, his perennial celebration of substance, richness, colour, the great blossoming of form – to use one of his own phrases – all in the name of painting, was never unattached from a sense of mortality ...”

“... In your average bookstore, the volumes stacked by the dozen and sold under the heading of Self-Help are liable to be found quartered in the same part of the building as those falling under the less obviously improving rubric of Philosophy. It’s a little hard to see why, in the present age, when Philosophy has wrapped its professionalism aloofly around it and sneaked off down the corridor into the seminar room, casting sufficient doubt as it retreats from view on the mere existence of a self to make the notion of Self-Help seem at best paradoxical and at worst inconceivable ...”

“... to earlier and earlier writing, until there is little left that doesn’t speak, somehow, of self-renewal. Bradbury and Ruland maintain that American literature always has been and always will be ‘pre-eminently a modern literature’. Their history surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent ...”

“... Wear palm leaf drapery Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree. Paul Gauguin, ‘Self-Portrait with Glasses’ (1903) For Sweeney, Gauguin’s women represent the crudest version of the myth of island bliss. But you don’t have to look long at Gauguin’s work (a retrospective is at Tate Modern until 16 January) to realise that bliss is ...”

“... that feelings of crapness might be shooed away for ever by reading the right book. I’m talking self-help, auto-improvement, personal growth: the corner of the bookshop where sad-eyed people, credit card at the ready, are to be seen lifting down copies of Only One Shot: Aligning the Inner Soul with Action: How to Re-engineer Your Existence, Design a ...”

“... Fifties, has been slowly maturing not a well-tempered masterpiece but the garrulous, profligate self-celebrations of a precocious adolescent who never grew up. It is not even clear why the novel ends where it does, since ‘let us pause’ is all the narrator says in the middle of his last paragraph. Few of those lulled by the publicity into buying this ...”

“... clear, coherent, profound, shocking.’ Is it? Or is it just another barrage of bombast whose self-indulgent hyperbole undermines its own insights? I take it for granted that no one is going to deny this late in the day the underlying premise that women have been oppressed down the ages, and that sex has been one of the instruments of that ...”

“... how far we should see these poems as the limbs of Osiris, to be gathered into the unity of one self, story or structure. That was once the favoured approach to Modernist poetry; but Motion’s poetry is, in some ways at least, Post-Modernist. It gestures towards a coherence that is not achieved, that breaks down in blankness, disconnection and ...”