“... I associate with poets like Wordsworth and Arnold. The “great poetry” I like best has this self-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to consider itself.’ Harwood has spent his life going from job to job: forester, librarian, bus ...”

“... Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his leadership. He has had opportunities unavailable to any other Labour leader, and he has thrown nearly all of them away. The greatest ...”

“... skin-crawlingly around: the past, it declared, was harder to escape than we thought. Next was the self-consciously musical Jazz (1992), then the extravagant, overwrought Paradise (1998), which I hoped was a glitch. Love includes something of all Morrison’s big themes: the position of black people in US society; the damage men do to women; the sustaining ...”

“... 12-step path to recovery. Hannah is nobody’s saviour, least of all her own. And yet her lack of self-righteousness, together with her wit, is her saving grace: she knows she is no better than she is, and doesn’t try to hide it – at least, not from the reader, or from Robert. She is, in this and every other way, the opposite of her ...”

“... the transition from middle-class suburban Sandycove son to college man about town with enviable if self-conscious ease, helped along by his until now largely theoretical knowledge of Dublin’s haunts and late-night hang-outs: the Rí-Rá, the Break for the Border, O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street. He sinks pints of Guinness with classmates from all corners of ...”

“... with its own products. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sets out in such a drivingly self-sufficient way, eventually communicates, through the uniformity of its motifs and style, the narrowness of self – sufficiency – its solitude. Garcia Marquez has said that he was thinking about One Hundred Years of ...”

“... neglect Scottish affairs – showed that in the extreme circumstances of prolonged depression the self-help concepts of thrift, industry and self-supporting labour were annulled by the inadequacy of welfare. Professor Smout sums up: ‘what availed respectability if you ended up sleeping on a pile of straw and queuing for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comme on parlait à Sparte’ may seem peculiarly apposite to his work, but Sparta was in the air. Self-immolation, the theatrical gesture and its bombastic explanation were the stock-in-trade of every hack writer. Since David’s pictures could not speak and he himself did not get a forum for his sermonising until he was elected to the Convention, his public ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an Army medical profile, showing signs of ‘expediency, shyness, suspiciousness, forthrightness, self-sufficiency and high anxiety’. ‘It cannot be overstressed,’ Geraghty writes, ‘that the contemporary SAS is an instrument of psychological warfare.’ The winning of hearts and minds that was to become a catchword in Vietnam was a vital part of their ...”