Word: self-doubt
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...sense a strain of self-contempt these days in English satire? Not self-doubt, of course, and certainly not humility, just a weary roll of the eyes that follows a glance in the mirror? So it seems with Barnes' very funny, very sour new novel, which re-creates England as a theme park on the Isle of Wight. The park is the brainstorm of Sir Jack Pitman, an overweening press lord, and his staff members, one of whom has doubts: "How do we advertise the English...a people widely perceived...as cold, snobbish, emotionally retarded, and xenophobic? As well...
...this has made her more "useful," in her terms, as a recognizable human being. She was not simply born blessed with generosity; she struggled toward it by way of self-doubt, impatience, rage, ennui--all things that test the value of a mind. Readers enjoy quoting the diary's sweetest line--"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart"--but the passage that follows is more revealing: "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into...
...destiny and its consequences, that frames both the beauty of a Harvard education and its frustration. We are forever indebted to this institution for fine-tuning our ability to analyze critically and to examine, and yet, it is difficult not to succumb to occasional bouts of heightened consciousness and self-doubt as we analyze and over-analyze our every action. As a smart man named Charles Dickens once wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
...someone so proud of being tough, she seems touchingly eager for approval, anxious about how the article on her will turn out. (Rest assured, I say, the pictures are good.) Yet both in her mind and heart, she betrays no self-doubt about her views. Madeleine's War? "Well, I don't think it's solely mine. But I feel that we did the right thing, and I am proud of the role I played in it." Now, after a week that advanced the possibility of peace, her challenge is to show that she is as good at getting...
...Street any better than Euro Disney can compete with prototype theme-parks in Anaheim or Orlando. Maybe this copy-phenomenon explains our latent insecurities, which oftentimes induce an inferiority complex hidden by rampant self-justification or over-inflated egos (as exhibited in this article). Like the Academie Francaise, clinging to an exaggerated notion of French linguistic purity, Quad residents are prone to overcompensate for self-doubt inspired by the general consensus that our locale may not be as ideal as we might wish...