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“... wipe their webbed flesh on our cheekbones, and we imagine ourselves winged. The Gypsy Moth’s self-enchanted drawl, its music in two notes of self, regarding self, throbs in the pilot. Satisfaction secretes over face, mind and brain, until he is aglow to do it, to bomb. The readers ...”

“... Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded it. This proposal took off from an idea of Hugh Kenner’s, and any theory with two such exceptionally able sponsors needs treating with respect ...”

“... seen as the ultimate denial of that body unto death. In Kim Chernin’s large claim in The Hungry Self, modern woman’s obsession with eating and not-eating might even provide the royal road to the unconscious that dreams provided for Freud. Down there in Hades, did Persephone think obsessively about pomegranates while refusing to eat them; did she lovingly ...”

“... Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By trying to make poetry ‘accessible’, the popularisers flatter the poet into thinking deep feelings are poetry, and flatter the audience into applauding only what they already know, reducing the art to ...”

“... which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name won several prizes, including the Pulitzer, and was the ...”

“... central ideas about mothers and infants, about nurture and cure, about the authenticity of self, are evocative and powerful, but they are nonetheless heresy. Freud saw the triangle of Oedipal loves as a crucible for the development of personality; Winnicott focused on the earliest bonding of mother and child. Freud portrayed people driven by the ...”

“... democratic government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, a minimal state, property rights, self-regulating markets and the empowerment of the autonomous rational individual. Liberal ideas in the West had emerged in a variety of political and economic settings, in both Europe and North America. They originated in the Reformation’s stress on individual ...”

“... discharged a pistol in his direction, and a moment of prudent cowardice which greatly dented his self-esteem as a soldier – may well be related to it; the same is true of some unconscious currents in his emotional life, which he presents but makes little attempt to analyse. A year or two after his arrival in Palestine, Segre falls passionately in love with ...”

“... of their intellectual interests, so completely off the wall. But Yeats was one of the last great self-fashioners, and it is never quite possible to know how far he credited his own scrupulously cultivated absurdities, or even what ‘credited’ there would actually mean. On the one hand, there was the Celtic visionary who when he lived in Oxford couldn’t ...”

“... as a subversive science. For Lacan, the crux of Freud’s view is that there is no centred, stable self. People are constructed by language and society. But ego psychology has pointed itself in the other direction. Its notion of an autonomous ego supports the ‘illusion’ of the Cartesian subject, the ego as a rational and intentional agent. The ...”

“... books of selected pieces. He also worked as a part-time TV performer, conducting interviews, doing self-scripted monologues, taking part in round-table discussions and generally making his presence felt on screen. In 1982, he got his own programme, Clive James on Television, and became a mass-market celebrity. Clip show presenter, chat-show host, star of a ...”

“... of the Connors. His awareness of an unearned disapproval was to afford a secure basis for self-pity but also for a kind of grieving self-respect. And when literature became his friend, he was gratified to discover that some great writers had often felt as he did. Over the years there had been some mightily ...”

“... as a traveller, he sees and hears, yet he is always, quite deliberately but with a sort of modest self-assertiveness, a principal part of what we see and hear, like the donor in a painting, and visibly bearing his burden of a past. The effect is hard to describe; this is writing of a peculiar tonal distinction. There are few rhetorical flourishes; the ...”

“... stalker of regrets, was born to tell her. In doing so, she draws on the deep reservoirs of self-pity and victimology that Oprah has been wallowing in for 25 years. The two of them were made for each other, with their love of confession and ‘personal revelations’. Each, in her own lucrative way, has coarsened the public’s understanding of real ...”

“... a tramp he has just decapitated – which might seem more a literary game than anything else, if Self weren’t an accomplished writer who injects real horror into these morbid occasions. At one level My Idea of Fun is a version of the Faust story. A young boy, Ian Wharton, sells his soul to the devil. At university he goes to a psychiatrist who convinces ...”