“... We in the late 20th century make a fetish of leisure and pleasure: yet for most of us status, self-regard, identity and personal relationships are inextricably bound up with access to paid employment. The youthful rentiers of the Drones Club have not died out, but somnolent afternoons in billiard rooms have given way to frenetic action in the City; the ...”

“... and politicians, towards the creation of the British National Health Service. But there are also self-inflicted handicaps to ready comprehensibility: the author has done his best to impede communication. His structure means that he tracks through the period 1936-48 several times and with the year not always discernible, for he takes the plans of civil ...”

“... apparently strikes more deeply than the surface nostalgia of the Sixties; it accords with a female self-respect founded on notions of integrity which need have nothing to do with traditional domestic life. The fully-fashioned skirts, the richly shirred ruffles, the truly beautiful small prints and the pure cotton cloth connote the lack of compromise about ...”

“... be too severe to say that most thrillers aren’t worth reading because it’s in their nature to self-destruct, imploding with their terminal expositions of motive, means and opportunity. It’s true that, once the problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger ...”

“... and linguistic refinements available to the Cambridge male graduate. The interpolated, arty, self-pitying prose of Roger is there partly because it provides an illuminating contrast with Anna’s, whose favourite reading (The Thorn Birds, The Far Pavilions) may be held to have debased her sensibility but has no effect whatever on her sensible way of ...”

“... Little Me – a fictional autobiography published by Patrick Dennis 30 years ago in mockery of the self-adulatory memoirs which gushed, as they still gush, from actor-dramatists and other multi-talented luvvies? Little Me would not only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect ...”

“... the reader’s, and a childish pact is joined (as in the best romances). Tartt’s writing has the self-delighted explicitness and wonderment that we know so well from children’s fiction, or from adult versions like Swift and Dickens. This is not to be despised, for this wonderment returns fiction to its first principles, its primal scene. But it is ...”

“... the state, though always within the popular sovereignty of the nation. The People were one. It was self-evident to him that social categories, provinces, linguistic groups and particularisms of any kind had to be either unhealthy artifices or anachronistic survivals: nothing could stand between the French citizen and the French state, least of all the ...”

“... like that? In his travel book, The European Tribe, Phillips records that his sense of identity and self-esteem was woken when Emile Leroi Wilson, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, shouted at him: ‘Hey you, motherfucker. You don’t talk to black people or what? This place fuck up your head already.’ The main theme of Cambridge was that of the black better ...”

“... man I’ve loved and remained married to?’ For Bernard, told all this by Jeremy, it is so much self-justifying delusion: She left the Party years before me, but she never cracked, she never sorted the fantasy from the reality. Politico or priestess, it didn’t matter, in essence she was a hardliner ... You were either with her, doing what she was ...”

“... then been given the special status of literary consultant. While the other teachers taught mime, self-healing, massage, Tai-Chi and wind-surfing in groups, beginning at 7 a.m., Susan saw aspiring writers one at a time in the café on the beach, where she sat in a stately way sipping Greek coffee. She seemed to have thought deeply about writing, how it ...”

“... 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 been overdue. Returning to duty in 1976, Perkins found his old arguments for Aboriginal self-sufficiency consistent with the thinking of his new Liberal minister. The Aboriginal Development Commission, created in 1980, with Perkins as its first chair, was to invest a capital fund so as to create an independent revenue, meanwhile spending a general ...”

“... marks a rather drastic switch from the romantic to the classical, crediting Galen with a fussy, self-important manner and a weakness for dry Latin mottoes – Lux veritatis is the title of the final chapter, in which Cassius informs Galen that he intends to suppress most of what he has heard. We certainly do not warm to any of Prantera’s main characters ...”

“... invasion, to tame and cultivate their continent for fruitful use, and to evolve systems of self-government in which, however labelled, the accountability which gives legitimacy to rulers was a decisive component. Their societies functioned by principles of democratic accountability: wherever these failed, so did the systems in place. These principles ...”