“... as well as poetry, is persistently paradoxical. Full of gravitas and symbolism yet pervasively self-critical and ironic, his works elude and exasperate us, for, as Enright wittily pointed out, we expect the monumental to stand still. Thomas Mann, who has fared better abroad than his compatriot and coironist, consistently resorted to paradox when describing ...”

“... the professor. A gasp of outrage turns instantly to maternal tenderness for a man so childish and self-centred in his treatment of her. Her own vanity, the knowledge that a discussion of her feelings will be blocked by charges of hysteria, of behaving just like his wife, make it impossible for her to continue with the affair. The ‘great love’ is ...”

“... excellence, for the gesture that contrives an exact requirement, and which can be achieved only by self-discipline and practice.’ And it was three months since I’d seen Hoddle and Ardiles. So off I went again, this time to Highbury on New Year’s Day, for Arsenal v. Spurs. Since this is the key grudge-match of the year, I ought to have known better; on ...”

“... distinction (which, of course, would be untenable), but an existential one: the difference between self and other. To be in touch with reality is to be able to experience the world outside ourselves as outside ourselves, and this is an experience which novels, among other things, have it in their power to give us. Iris Murdoch’s novels do not notably give us ...”

“... thousands of brave citizens who opposed or defied them. They appear to shrink from looking some self-evident truths in the face. One such truth is that the horrors of the Dirty War were no secret either to the Callaghan or Thatcher governments, or to many others in the allied world; and that if the allied powers had rallied behind the Carter ...”

“... had already published his translation of the Journals – and who ‘did perhaps accept a touch of self-identification in concentrating on this peculiar and tormented figure’. He is lightly sketched in the character Pennistone in The Military Philosophers, leaving out ‘immensities’ which include an existentialist distaste for abstract thought and a love ...”

“... much of Jane Austen’s technique through her corrections of the niece’s: this character is not self-consistent, the early history of another should be hinted earlier in the book, Honourables are not introduced as such in the drawing-room, an elegant baronet wouldn’t say ‘Bless my Heart.’ But it was her niece Fanny Knight who showed the highest ...”

“... can be said to have been achieved at a heavy cost not only in human lives but also in national self-esteem. But the Vietnam War, while it overshadowed American politics and diplomacy during those four years, by no means limited the vast field through which Dr Kissinger, as Presidential Assistant for National Security, had to range. There was the continuous ...”

“... people. But I’m not certain he ever is put together. The bits and pieces of Fergus and his wily self-justification are an old story in Scotland, and very much enjoyment is to be got out of them in Mr Jenkins’s new version: but he has not made Fergus a convincing modern character. There are worrying hiatuses in his supposed moral development, especially in ...”

“... wasteful duplication of new titles in such areas as cookery, gardening, health, beauty, yoga, self-help. There is a huge choice for the consumer, but at what a price to the trade. During the 1974 recession it was expected that much waste and over-production in publishing would be flushed out by financial exigencies, and that a trimmer and more soundly ...”

“... moving – especially, here, the love poems, or rather the poems of separation, and the occasional self-contained play of imagination, like ‘Truce’, a recreation of the Christmas fraternisation between British and German troops in 1914. Thomas Kinsella is the kind of poet you either can or can’t take. He is very strong meat. After an auspicious ...”

“... for a Confessor, having suffered, and long by the Bigotts of both Parties’. In our sceptical and self-consciously tolerant age, Erasmus seems at times to be coming into his own. Until quite recently, the modern revival of Erasmus and his legacy has rested chiefly on the great critical edition of his correspondence by Percy Stafford Allen, who from 1924 to ...”

“... the Tudor Street Weekly. Occasionally, I get the disloyal suspicion that there is something rather self-indulgent, a trifle embarrassing, possibly even juvenile rather than Juvenal, about either pushing, or mainlining, 52 shots of undiluted humour a year. Almost nobody can resist dipping into a open box of chocolates, if it is left hanging about within ...”

“... to be reversed. It is a love letter by an aging and ailing man in a world which valued dignity and self-control. Clearly, if things had gone better, the new house in St David Street would have had a mistress. The added material in the book does not really justify the title of a new edition, since it could well have been put across within a learned article, and ...”

“... even set foot in a sandwich bar, let alone a singles bar, and wouldn’t know what to order’). Self-deprecation is one of the most characteristic types of Jewish humour, at least in its published form, and it should be noted that this is the first general book of etiquette that gives proportional space to the Bris (‘Miss Manners needn’t tell you that ...”