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“... in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the ...”

“... career. I remember also that during my Royal Free period I was reading R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self – so I came to an awareness both of the state-mandated asylums, and of those who radically opposed them, at more or less the same time. Still, I don’t believe I’m atypical, either among the psychically distressed or those who’ve never suffered from ...”

“... talk about your work and not your life, if you don’t mind. ‘Bob’s patrician manner was self-created,’ Jonathan Galassi told me, ‘deliberately low-key, warm yet self-protective.’ The thing was to keep moving forward and not look back. Even at Barbara Epstein’s wake, held in her apartment on West 67th ...”

“... fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’ Compound terms using ‘self-’ often raise questions about agency and responsibility. When we speak of ‘self-criticism’ or ‘...”

“... and who knows what they may make of it? – a different kind of case history, one of compacted self-delusion, grandiosity and monstrous self-pity. Dutifully, I set to. I reread My Dark Places and once more exposed myself to the fanfaronade of his self-interrogation as he detailed the ...”

“... regarded the state as a means by which the less fortunate among us could be enabled to achieve the self-expression and moral fulfilment which is their right as creatures made in God’s image’, now writes: ‘Of all lessons the one which history most earnestly presses upon us and which we most persistently brush aside is “Beware the state!” ’ And he ...”

“... Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in the course of a series of manic highs which came and went from maturity, if not before, until the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60 ...”

“... Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they finally set out for Wales, Coleridge’s head ...”

“... Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed footnotes) points out cheekily that ‘Homer is allowed to be the oldest ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... included verse in Middle English, Latin, Old French and Old English as well as the language of Robert Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and ...”

“... George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam o’Shanter’, MacDiarmid’s last trump blawing ‘tootle-ootle-oo’, Edwin Morgan’s Loch Ness Monstering ‘Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok ...”

“... than I see that reality reclaimed and borne away by the uncontrollable river of things.’ This self-cancelling – or possibly short-circuiting – property of the Surrealist frisson (or indeed the Situationists’ ‘situations’ and ‘détournements’), was explained by Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life, in terms of his own roughly equivalent ...”

“... brilliance on our attention, the four novelists here under review would be clustered towards the self-effacing side of the spectrum, with colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end. Paul Theroux’s last novel, My Secret History, deployed a cool transparency of style to great effect in telling a story which ...”

“... This is the process, named after a legal battle involving the disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell, whereby those criticised in the first draft of a report are given an opportunity to respond. Chilcot hoped to begin this process in 2013, but negotiations over the publication of minutes of cabinet meetings and the correspondence between Tony ...”