“... otiose or actively misleading annotations and, above all, the fatuous commentary of a cynical, self-satisfied authorial persona whose only real interest is in multiplying print commodities and, therefore, his income. The aesthetics of obscurity is his greatest resource. ‘It is with Writers, as with Wells,’ he tells us. The thing to do with a shallow ...”

“... differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t – from Elizabeth, his fellow monarch and godmother, whom he never met, but with whom his relations had been complex and often fraught, despite the diplomatic amity ...”

“... power; in the second, lightness, clarity and weakness. In other words, it was both an exercise in self-ridicule and a warning.’ Everything Milosz says is light and clear; it certainly isn’t weak, but it is unemphatic, unemotional, scrupulous, fastidious, reticent. Milosz returns to this contrast on a number of occasions. ‘Nothing is more deceptive than ...”

“... to force Bowlby-stuck judges to realise that fathers can look after their children’. Self-obsession, what Christopher Lasch calls ‘pathological narcissism’, is the third cause of our advanced divorce rate. Gathorne-Hardy doesn’t mention Lasch, but in a chapter entitled ‘The Privilege Bulge’ he writes about the same ‘rage to ...”

“... found in Schnaase, and later in Riegl and Wölfflin, of an autonomous development in art, a self-transformation: the freedom of the artist comes to imply the freedom of art. The clearest example of this autonomy is Riegl’s discussion of the development of ornamental motifs. For example, he argues that the acanthus motif emerged, not in imitation of ...”

“... girls with the means to achieve something like Unity of Being; Moore, accurate and quietly self-assertive as usual, merely says it enabled her to have what she wanted. The vague shape of what she wanted was already present in her mind and habits, and the college years allowed it to become more definite. She was already writing poetry, but it is in her ...”

“... as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so it might never have been created had it not been for the remarkable things that happened to its author and his consciousness, as a result of a cocktail of alcohol and assorted drugs, and of the ...”

“... expunged from the later version. It was something of a paradox that in the middle of the war this self-important innocent should have been chosen by Hitler to run the arms economy for him. Success in this endeavour made it more and more unlikely that the new Berlin would materialise. Indeed if Speer’s efforts had kept the war going six months longer Berlin ...”

“... politics; nobility and grandeur don’t, as with Elgar, wake doubts about a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when its implications are carried out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.’ There is certainly a disappearance of the ego which undercuts the possibility of solipsistic thinking: it shows up later in the challenge to the very ...”

“... the voice in which his poems spoke, already had a tinge of bardic anonymity, a suggestion that the self had indeed been humbled, but momentously: Seamus Heaney the man was being elected, so it seemed to him, into the role of Seamus Heaney, poet. If this makes him sound like George Barker, it absolutely shouldn’t. What is attractive about Heaney’s response ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... justifying the popular fascination with ‘heritage’, even in its more meretricious forms. Most self-consciously ‘progressive’ writers have tended to denounce the heritage business as an unacceptable opiate: not only does it enable aristocrats to go on living in their country houses; it also presents a sanitised and sentimental version of the past in ...”

“... 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 ...”