“... 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 ...”

“... for something like George Brown’s 1964-65 National Plan was challenged by the powerful and self-confident Industries Group, which confined itself to specific questions of market research, rationalisation or industrial relations, like a modern NEDC sector working party. Max Nicholson, who covers this period, seems now to believe that the chance of ...”

“... to being written about, though her three novels and 12 volumes of poetry seemed to have taken her self-portrait as far as it need go. It might be thought, too, that after the death of her sister in 1975 the truth about Stevie, if hidden, would be hard to find. However, her biography has now been undertaken by two American scholars – a matter of satisfaction ...”

“... seeks to persuade the hierarchy in Europe. Most of the way he is portrayed as manipulative, self-seeking and spiritually vain. But his end is a noble one, and his part in the mission has at least ensured a hearing for the faith amid all the diplomatic skirmishing. Hasekura is at first baffled by the worship Christians accord to ‘this ugly emaciated ...”

“... in hand’. Popean, if not quite Mandevillian, in their humanitarianism, the benefactors knew that self-love and social were the same. As Thomas Coram himself computed the matter of charity towards the young, ‘a pound of malaga Raisins which costs 3d fills them with above 5 pounds worth of Love for me.’ Basking in the theatricality of good works in the ...”

“... travellers come home with and are charged with making up – the traveller in question being a self-effacing romantic singleton who would not be out of place in a short story by Denton Welch. Now we have the wonders of the near-at-hand, located in and around the Black Mountains of Radnor. Mr Chatwin’s strange new place accommodates the lore of twinship ...”

“... how infuriating it is that our bureaucratic rulers should have cooked up these plans for their self-preservation without opening the subject to the public and proper Parliamentary debate. Part of the trouble stems from the British disease of rule by a permanent establishment of regular civil servants, military officers and intelligence officers who embrace ...”

“... France in the 1780s), and also that this could be avoided by making wars of conquest self-supporting, or even profitable. On the other hand, the fiscal problem of how to pay for wars is barely considered, nor the advantages and consequences of various means of doing so, such as the inflationary printing of currency which (as Galbraith has ...”

“... Arnots looked bleak. Fortunately for the couple, and for British Business, common sense and mutual self-interest prevailed. The Saudis keep much of their money in Britain, or channel it through the City. A real, as distinct from a purely cosmetic display of displeasure would do them as much harm as us. A bargain was struck. Lord Carrington made his notorious ...”