“... themselves off as boys, did another set of dangers assail them in armies not known for their self-control and delicacy? There are psychological questions as well. In ballads and folk tales the cross-dresser is frequently depicted as following a male lover. But factual accounts suggest that this is not often the case. Women might cross-dress to avoid ...”

“... had grown enormously’ since he first met her. ‘She has become a lady of over-whelming self-confidence and self-importance,’ he told his diary. Yet, if that verdict is just, the mind-broadening seminars and the contacts with the intellectually sharp Mr Urban and others probably had quite a lot to do with the ...”

“... for a public drubbing in language which he would have discarded as extreme (‘tasteless, tacky, self-centred’) in his back-bench heyday as a semi house-trained polecat. The army of rats has now been joined by Lord McAlpine of West Green, Thatcher’s ‘jolly bagman’, as he calls himself. Margaret Thatcher’s affection for the British construction ...”

“... the countryside throwing up the meeting-halls that the communes needed for their mass-rallies and self-criticism sessions. Many of the interviewees work very hard: we meet a young dentist who is on call for 27 days at a stretch, takes a two-hour bus ride to her home, and spends her three-day leave coping with the month’s accumulated housework. Husbands are ...”

“... a life of its own: one conspirator, T-Jay Mackey, decides that Everett’s plan ‘was anxious and self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way.’ The snipers must shoot to kill. But the lesson still applies. As Mackey explains: The barrier is down ... When Jack sent out the word to get Castro, he put himself in a world ...”

“... matter. Why is it that only the memoir – a comprehensive genre shading off into travel books, self-creations in childhood and so forth – seems still at this moment to possess the contextual confidence and authority which once came naturally to the novel? No doubt the novel will reassert itself in time, but just now it seems to have lost its Bagshaw-like ...”

“... Although I knew him to be some what more literary-worldly than he liked to seem, the drift of his self-presentation had always been to stand craggily aloof from metropolitan book-circuses. Also his most recent Moortown poems had impressively traversed the dead-end he seemed to have run into with the blood-drenched Crow. He appeared to have found a new line ...”

“... started work, you have to be elderly and are likely to be increasingly indulgent to your younger self. Freedman seems conscious that she is working from rather a small selection, but says that her theoretical base is ‘broadly conceived and interdisciplinary. My work is heavily indebted to the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology, history, literary ...”

“... am like Scrooge? Have I not renounced all for Art? The Scrooge-Christ of Art, who has hoarded his self to Writing the Father. And not gained the world. Because who buys his books? And lost his soul. Wherein lie all my profits?’ Lucchesi feels very good. No chance he’ll weep now. Raises window high to let in a blast of icy air. Inhales deep. The heat had ...”

“... of time, but the mood of this novel is bleaker and the rummage through history blinkered by self-interest. While Still ran up against the impossibility of locating beginnings, the characters in Pieces of Light suffer from a yearning to return to or reconfigure a time before trauma. As Hugh’s war-ravaged father continues his colonisation of the ...”

“... ones, this one, now, here.’ This is therapy writing. As Ash admits, ‘Diaries, they’re so self-indulgent ... If you write something down, it goes away.’ In ‘God’s gift’ we don’t know enough to care about the ‘I’ circling round the subject of her lost love or the ‘you’ she’s addressing. Smith makes a virtue of avoiding endings, but ...”

“... in the mess (‘I’m a devout coward’). The novel is far too intelligent to take refuge in the self-protective attitudes with which Kingsley Amis and his friends guarded themselves by means of systematic derision from similar sorts of situation. No clowning around, no references to Bastards’ HQ and the like. For most young combatants the war became a ...”

“... and expressive manner than traditional biographical methods allow. Dutch brims with whimsy and self-conscious writerliness. Every other sentence swims in a coulis of the author’s self-regard. ‘Memory. Desire,’ muses ‘Morris’ in his prologue. ‘What is this mysterious yearning of biographer for subject, so akin ...”

“... that their inheritance from the Empire-builders was ‘an ease around the world, and an infinite self-confidence. Following their knightly imaginations, wandering across the face of the earth, they had no axe to grind. Theirs was, briefly, an age of chivalry, soon to be laid at rest in the trenches ...’ We are talking here about toffs, as they keep their ...”

“... relief (for he can now feel injured) she simply gets rid of the governess. In contrast to her self-restraint, there is the interlocking story of her devoted friend, Vincy. A dandyish observer of life, Vincy has a mistress, Mavis, an impoverished young art student whose red hair is ‘generally untidy at the back’. Her poverty, which brings her close to ...”