“... to Roger Lewis himself, for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is above all a writer’s essay in self-portraiture. Readers of Lewis’s previous book, Stage People, might have expected as much, for he hinted at his own eccentric theory of biography there in an ominous aside. A propos Citizen Kane, he remarked: ‘Welles knew ... that any man is too complex ...”

“... with the sense that these locutions have been carefully chosen and placed by the speaker’s adult self. This produces an acoustic and visual doubling, so words and scenes are presented simultaneously from the past looking forward, and from the present looking back – an effect introduced in the starting poem, ‘On Our Marks’, which concludes: At the end ...”

“... English, presumably intended as a sign of her own education, rarely penetrates a self-imposed haze of Christmas card smugness: ‘For ignorance is criminal / In this enlightened day, / So let us all get busy / When once we’ve found the way.’ Apart from one or two stirring numbers, the music flounders and sprawls, clutching at a gravity ...”

“... of aesthetic value are routinely bypassed. Of the two critics under review, Malcolm Bradbury is a self-conscious progressive, but he writes the old kind of history. D.J. Taylor is a self-conscious reactionary whose book is a rather strange example of the new kind. Taylor’s belief, set out bluntly in his introduction, is ...”

“... thing to do. It is dominant, as they say in the rationality business. That doesn’t merely seem self-evident, it is self-evident, or so most readers will say to themselves. The second principle needs a little cultivation, for it is best put in terms of probabilities. In one version, when you are uncertain what will ...”

“... family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.’ Happily in later life, the poet was able gradually ‘to free himself from ...”

“... railroad. Each chapter deals with an aspect of his publishing career: police reports, plagiarism, self-advertisements and financing. Bloch’s main point of contemporary reference is Balzac’s Illusions perdues. Finding a mirror for Migne’s reality in the Comédie humaine is not without its dangers and induces a suspicion that Migne himself may not have ...”

“... during her bleakest periods of despair, she always seems to have been buoyed up by a mysterious, self-sustaining glee. Drunk or sober (more often the former than the latter), flush or destitute, star, salesgirl, call-girl, or, final incarnation, grande dame and monstre sacrée, she never lost a talent for living memorably. Born a ...”

“... source; it certainly ignores, probably wilfully, the extent to which the ‘imagination’ as a self-justifying entity has been called into question by a wide range of modern literary theory. Under Briggflatts may exclude the more obviously secular poetry of its period for reasons to do with the view argued in the essay on Muir and Clarke: its omissions are ...”

“... and beautiful observations have the effect of creating and bringing the reader back to herself, a self all the more quietly egocentric for being as inaccessible today as that of her brother, as much a part of a style and a period. It is impossible to imagine the actuality of William and Dorothy, their being and conversing together, but the scenes that must ...”

“... that the poet and therefore the poem are visibly products of a region – while protecting it-self against anticipated complaints that such a view is insular. When I last wrote about Curnow, in 1963, I backed my text with references to an essay by Allen Tate defending regionalism in literature against an internationalist position which Tate cleverly ...”

“... genocide of the Amerindians) is not even a secret from schoolchildren, fed though they are on the self-censored and sanitised work of academics who identify with the Establishment and cover up its crimes, for whatever careerist or Freudian motives of their own. James Hunter, author of the classic Making of the Crofting Community (1976), has credited Prebble ...”

“... Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s father, Manuel, was so competitive with his own children that he could not accept it when his eldest son began ...”

“... such suckers? Were all their ideas, of good and bad and right and wrong, of God, of manners, of self-endeavour, of a rough and ready egalitarianism ... were all these simply a conspiratorial implant from the class above them? And if so, what are we to make of the Scottish radicals, including Marxists, who sprang almost entirely from this ...”

“... where Charles Edward Stuart had slept, dressing Johnson up in bonnet and broadsword, was not just self-indulgence on Boswell’s part, but a way of proving to himself and to his absent but always censorious father that he, Boswell, remained a true Scot, that London had not seduced him quite from his original identity. Away from the capital and sophisticated ...”