“... as ever, are plain enough. After 1912, without compromising his identity as a solitary tramper and self-communer, he developed a circle of new friends who helped him to make the most of his personality rather than sorrowfully submitting to the miseries it produced. With Clifford Bax he rediscovered some of his undergraduate jauntiness; in Eleanor Farjeon he ...”

“... For him, it is necessary to understand society in depth. For Dr Starkey, on the other hand, it is self-evident that, to understand political events, it is necessary to understand political circles. If Dr Starkey wishes to understand an event in a period of which he has previously known nothing, he will ask who was Groom of the Stool: Professor ...”

“... in the first days of Queen Victoria’s reign, loved men and women indiscriminately without undue self-laceration, without visible private guilt or degrading public shame’. So of course might the Dodds of today, but Gay suggests – and indeed the diary entries show it – that Dodd’s feelings were an inspiration to him, a source of psychic energy and ...”

“... of unintended promotion takes a subtler form in the case of Amis’s fictional counter-hero, John Self, the money-glutton and pornographer, a man with as much interior culture as a massage parlour. The author describes this crass compendium of gross appetites so brilliantly, and with such inventive wit, that the character comes to seem perversely deep and ...”

“... seem to have impinged less on the younger man. He was young, and coming home famous made him self-important. He had what O’Brian calls a sudden rush of pomp to the head. As a result, he missed the next boat south. A new expedition was planned. Banks demanded a larger ship and a greater degree of personal control than the Admiralty was willing to ...”

“... cryptic, the sexual relationship is fully lit. Guerrillas tells how an outcast, hustler and self-proclaimed revolutionary, Jimmy Ahmed, has returned from London to his native island, and has formed a commune for drop-out youths. He takes up with a wandering Englishwoman, Jane, who has come looking for action in the Third World and has found this corner ...”

“... sense of him looking for affection, though there is a beautiful account of his friendship with a self-assured and decidedly eccentric boy, Mickey Wall. When he introduced me to his sister, Edna, a nice but slightly irritable 19-year-old, she was bending over the fire grate. ‘This is my sister, Edna,’ he said ... I was prepared to be impressed by her ...”

“... heroes: the High Style. To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the 20th century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work. It began with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), at times very shakily: for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a Thesaurus of low-life patois. Herzog ...”

“... would have been the eradication of village poverty and unemployment through individual and social self-reliance. The writings show a Gandhi who runs against the Independence-current of modern Indian history.Raghavan Iyer has approached the writings by presenting them around a number of themes. For better or worse, this separates them at once from the ...”

“... revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized fixation on matters of literary rank – a fixation perhaps Maileresque in its immensity and scope. The settings, we might say, are different, drabber, Hull not Brooklyn, and so on, but the ache for supremacy is ...”

“... Spain. The Spanish galleon is in turn captured by a French ship, the captain of which, a noble and self-sacrificing individual named Déterville, falls instantly and desperately in love with her but, concealing his passion, looks after her with tender care on their homeward journey (which is also a time-journey, for we skip two centuries) to France. Meanwhile ...”

“... display of intelligence is beginning to be seen as presumptuous. So rampant have utilitarian and self-satisfied populist attitudes to art become that the very idea of devoting air waves or column inches to an aesthetic view of things seems almost offensive. When, in a Listener attack on Mainly for Pleasure in 1980, Hans Keller asked, ‘is unbilled car-radio ...”

“... dismay and were duly shocked. But there is a limit to how patronising I can be about our youthful self-deceit. When Richard Neville’s book starts to tell the story of the Oz trial, it is hard not to become engaged, or re-engaged. All the old astonishment and enragement at the idiocy, time-wasting and viciousness of the law and its officers comes back as ...”

“... speculating about the nature of society as making positive suggestions for its improvement. The self-contradictions and simultaneous embracing of conflicting viewpoints that served him so well in other fields were not what was wanted here. Anyone whose acquaintance with him was confined to the material made available to us in Mason and Wokler’s Political ...”

“... is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not very bright; yet at the same time we are not openly invited to shake our fists or hiss. Compare Dickens’s treatment of Mrs Jelly-by in Bleak House. As high-minded neglecters of their own children the two women resemble each ...”