“... and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination simply does not soar, nor his insight pierce ...”

“... precious to uncork. McGann turns the tables on the common judgment that Morris’s books were too self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade ...”

“... his ‘universe henceforth without master’, and the hero of these poems. The breach between the self and the world is the problem: ‘How to live without being torn between these infinities?’ Popa asked in one of the few short notes he wrote on poetry. What interests him is the dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his ...”

“... The attempt to wall Davis off in this way from some ‘real’ LA to which he does not belong is self-discrediting, as is the associated fantasy that insecure Angelenos have embraced Ecology of Fear to smear their city and curry favour with the New York establishment. It is also true, as Davis and his defenders point out, that no scholar’s footnotes could ...”

“... on a Train (1951) to Marnie (1964) – the period many regard as the peak of his career – Robert Burks served as cinematographer, George Tomasini as editor, and Bernard Herrmann as composer. The deaths of Burks and Tomasini and the falling out with Herrmann must, as Auiler suggests, have had something to do with the director’s subsequent ...”

“... does get a little chilly in the long run, and Ulrich, like his creator, has a strange capacity for self-satisfaction alongside his gift for self-criticism. But the writing never stops being funny and illuminating, and we’d be lost if we had to approve of writers in order to keep reading them. Ulrich is a fully developed ...”

“... held it to be the prime cause of death, yet Evans-Pritchard could find no evidence of any ‘self-conscious’ witches among them. The question ‘Were there people who believed themselves to be witches?’ has thus long been excluded from consideration. But it seems that this self-denying ordinance is becoming ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... of which the axioms were known, not through experiments, but through intuition, revelation and self-evidence. This kind of pure scientist felt one-up on a man who dissected dead animals – a snobbism which has lasted more than 300 years. He quotes Thomas Pratt, one of the founders of the Royal Society, writing in 1667: ‘The first thing that ought to be ...”

“... and it is hard to see what Unionists could have done except resist Home Rule, not merely from self-interest, but from a purist belief that Home Rule was a corrupt bargain extracted from an already decadent imperial power. There are comparisons to be made here with the Boers in the 1890s and the public posture of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. No wonder ...”

“... incapable of acting except foolishly, except when the occasion doesn’t require it, because he is self-bewilderingly odd. There is a character who claims to have no father, only a grandfather, and when that is called an odd omission, cannot see why: he is a type of all Gerhardie’s sympathetic characters, and nearly all of them are sympathetic. The ...”

“... of denying the immortality of the soul, for example, that sounds less than totally ingenuous. Robert Fogelin, who has written extensively on Wittgenstein and more recently on Hume, is mainly concerned in his latest book to correct an imbalance in Hume interpretation.* In the earlier part of this century a common view was that Hume’s main achievement was ...”

“... a touch over his pupils’ heads, hoping his allusions will be ‘looked up’ and encourage self-improvement. A teacher may use this technique: but a novelist, supposedly talking with equals, may offend his readers and spoil his plain story, as Aldous Huxley did, making us feel he is patronising us, showing off. Burgess knows his pupils’ reluctance to ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”