Like Melville, Mr. Nissenson has "that very private, very patient concentration and the self-knowledge of doing something utterly original".
To Holiday's high, hornlike tone he added the hard-won self-knowledge of an out gay man.
Mr. Jarmillo's Fernando is an effete sophisticate who radiates the rueful self-knowledge of a jaded world traveler killing time by figuratively fiddling while Rome burns.
Things up above were pure and shining and smooth, and were held aloft, like the ladies in the Renaissance romances, by the conceited self-knowledge of their perfection.
The light of the adversary, the light of the church, light of the eye of God? Light, perhaps, of self-knowledge: of all these together".
Of course, parody politics in America quickly becomes real politics, too, but tends to lack the saving self-knowledge of its origins in parody.
His unfavorable characterization -- it could scarcely have been anything else -- of Gore's patheticomic 1988 presidential run presents a man with the self-knowledge of an invertebrate.
She was witty, she was straightforward and she captured something lovely in the ambiguous self-knowledge of a young woman turning toward love.
Again and again, after starting from an ancient premise of radical difference between humans and other creatures, scientists have discovered profound similarities among us all, profound enough to undermine the initial arrogance and the false self-knowledge of that premise.
Whether playing Jimmy or Schiller or Richard M. Nixon in "Frost/Nixon," Mr. Langella projects the tragic self-knowledge of an older man reassessing his life more acutely than any other actor today.
In some respects, Read is attempting to occupy the same territory as Philip Roth in his later work – of impotence as a spur to the self-knowledge of "the dying animal" – but the parameters are altogether more English and restrained.
