“... sounds the nicest, and certainly the most soulful, though not without faults: she was terribly self-absorbed and self-pitying. James Fox is her grandson, but he gives her only just over two columns of entries in his index, while Nancy has four and a half, with a long section on ‘character’. It has subheadings for ...”

“... with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince ...”

“... of luck in my career,’ says Mr Turner, ‘so I don’t want to moan too much about having to self-publish. If I’d had a longer life expectation I might have hung on a bit longer and kept trying for a commercial publisher. You might wonder why I didn’t get myself an agent, but agents don’t want to take on octogenarians.’ After 18 excellent books ...”

“... heart of his political thought is a notion that is familiar to us from Fanon: ‘the return to the self’. The Third World, as it was then called, had been colonised not just by the armies but by the commercial products and ideologies of the West. For all its fathomless history and monuments of thought and literature, Iran was, in the famous term coined by ...”

“... should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation’. The ethnically self-standing was the politically and morally self-stultifying. It obstructed human evolution, not least because it prevented the more civilised from elevating the less. Social progress depended on ‘the mixture of races under ...”

“... forms of human life. The years from the 1780s to the 1850s saw, not only the first great phase of self-sustained economic growth, but also the first great phase of self-sustained discussion about poverty. Throughout this period, the poor, the tired and the huddled masses forced themselves on public attention in greater ...”

“... pose the question: how did Gaitskell himself see his diary? An intellectual discipline, a self-imposed requirement to reflect on and learn from his own experience? A means of emotional and intellectual release? A record for history? A defence against misrepresentation? A source for a much later volume of memoirs or autobiography, never to be ...”

“... to look at it with a mixture of fascination and discomfort. The near-bankruptcy of the largest self-governing city in the industrialised world was certainly a circus worth watching, and, as many other American cities soon discovered, it could not be watched disinterestedly. The aversion of investors for bonds and notes issued by New York City soon spread ...”

“... George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw state, and the very rhythm of her remorseless, circular and outstandingly honest narrative reflects the essentially inward-looking perceptions of a woman, as opposed to the linear undertakings of a man. Therefore, instead of writing ...”

“... men are to earth o’ergiven/these the companions’), but also that he needed to underline the self-abnegation. Sincerity, like patriotism (which Davie has too), is not enough. Moving as these recollections often are, in their evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an ...”

“... or his elect, are rather interesting. The arts to be learned are not those of seduction but of self-esteem, although the means to the desired end are sometimes rather recherché. So promising are the lessons that it seems a great shame that the men on whom the women are allowed to practise offer so little in the way of a challenge. But more than all this ...”

“... conception of Union Street is original, and each of its characters gets a good enough run. But the self-imposed limitations of the structure are always in evidence. There is no doubt at all about the Canadian Margaret Atwood’s being a novelist. Both Lady Oracle (first published in 1976 and now appearing in paperback) and Bodily Harm are splendid ...”

“... book is uncompromising in this regard. Few political writers more than Lippmann stripped the self of its ties to community, family and personal loyalty, in order to enhance the claims of a ‘national’ interest. He perfected the idea that democracy was to be celebrated for (rather than by) the masses by people who knew better, experts who were members ...”

“... ritual of killing, by guillotine or by hanging, was acceptable – but not the ritual of self-inflicted death by choice. I see Mishima’s exit as an act of faith and duty as a patriotic Japanese, and also as the inevitable fulfilment of his very, very personal artistic ideal. It has long been in our tradition that any ...”

“... not make the country’s present agonies any less horrible, or Beirut’s relentlessly detailed self-dismantling – much of it performed on prime-time television – any less unprecedented, and interminably, senselessly miserable to witness. The whole process has by now become a large-scale version of the Laurel and Hardy film of two men who vengefully ...”