“... 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 ...”

“... to ask. Eleni must have been a tough, shrewd, brave woman: I doubt whether she would have had the self-involved sentimentality to see herself as one of those ‘baby chicks, dyed a brilliant scarlet’ to be sold at Easter, and pecked to death by ‘ordinary fowl outraged at their unconventional plumage’. The dyeing and the selling are Mr Gage’s, and I ...”

“... felt the same, each in his own way – that what he really liked about me was a shadow-self of his own creation: someone who combined a colonial’s dash and freedom from convention with Jewish wisdom and an artist’s melancholy and percipience. No wonder he was disappointed! He was a great categoriser of people, and when he had a category he ...”

“... and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with us in the genre. The dustjacket of the Shell Guide claims that ‘none of the great many books’ on the city ‘delves as deeply into London’s historical and social background’. The genre suffers from another ...”

“... to solve it: the bourgeoisie applauds the ‘subversive’ artist as a licensed anti-self. Kings used to applaud their fools in much the same way. But Professor Brooke-Rose has no stomach for such grand or grandiose theories. Sounding more and more like Dame Helen, she proposes to get on with the job of analysing a specific text. She ...”

“... darkness of this Russian universe, there are other intelligent beings: ‘dozens of stubborn, self-contained individuals like me – each of us writing, with honour and conscience as his guides, all that he knew about our age ...’ The other belief is that their work will only appear long after they are all dead, hidden by friends and descendants in ...”

“... incoherent. But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess. Conversely, the conservative vision of society has never been very hospitable to liberal ideals of free speech, open competition, impartial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”