“... amount of just hanging there.’ The piece ends with a comment on a regrettable ‘vast area of self-experience’, namely the fact that the sky is now so often a war zone: ‘That’s who we are.’ Just before this conclusion, however, the sky offers a reading of ‘a wonderful and forgiving aspect of Hindu thought’ that helps us to see why the idea of ...”

“... A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25), has changed somewhat, as befits someone who now spends his time offering executive advice to ...”

“... exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clearly an animal. It had a distinct ‘head’ and a ‘tail’ (like the early embryo); it was self-propelling, lived in flocks and even died. It went into the egg, Andry speculated, held the door shut behind it, and grew up. The role of the egg in spermism was obvious. Though huge, it could be seen as providing food, lots of it, and a soft, roomy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a strong school of thought that any form of institutional history is no more than corporate self-aggrandisement. Of course, in many cases it is. We have all seen the glossy volumes dreamed up by the public relations (or, as they tend to be known nowadays, ‘corporate affairs’) people. Lots of pictures and a text which hypes the company while failing ...”