“... inspired by them. Of the two, Spence’s book is more ideographic and narrative, Gray’s the more self-consciously explanatory. Spence is telling a story, relying on a time-honoured alternation between pointillistic details and broad strokes, with no inclination to canvass multiple explanations of events he is relating. Reading Gray, one feels part of a ...”

“... we will not be hearing much about ‘merely good chaps, or fairly good chaps’, nor about ‘self-restrained’ chaps, or ‘secretive’ chaps. And fair enough, we have to say: these are his memoirs, after all. But what then is left to tell? Luckily, Amis possesses a good memory for anecdotes, or so he says, and he is also not too choosy when it comes ...”

“... Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the lion himself. And 36 years still to come ...”

“... But what a strange complaint to make when one has come back from London to, of all places, Paris. Self-importance is an occupational hazard in writers – which is one of the reasons one would prefer any amount of Nancy Mitford’s so-called Roedean hoydenishness to the self-importance of some of her middle-class ...”

“... a much wider pattern of fourth and fifth-century Christian culture which based itself openly and self-consciously on traditional pagan models. Educated bishops delighted in their non-Christian learning; letters, sermons, witty table talk and even doctrinal tracts were all regarded as suitable vehicles for virtuoso displays of erudition. In over one hundred ...”

“... than other Muldoon volumes. His previous long poems in particular tend to be sealed off within the self-reflexive confines of their own ludic patterning, a maze of mirrors one enters arbitrarily and inexplicably: the action of ‘Immram’ (Why Brownlee Left, 1980), for instance, is initiated by ‘a sixteen-ounce billiard cue’ with which the narrator is ...”

“... Italy, there was a continuous tradition of secular literature in Hebrew, followed by a more self-consciously programmatic secular literary movement that began in Moses Mendelssohn’s Germany and moved east to Poland and Russia, generating journals and literary coteries as well as some original writers. But Harshav, aware of the way languages ...”

“... cheerfully informal, suited the British. Alain Prost’s articulate reasonableness fed a French self-image. Senna was good-looking, ruthless, remote and intense. He was a touch spiritual – he would read his Bible on flights back and forth to Europe and was not averse to attributing his more inspired moments to a force greater than his own – and fiercely ...”

“... invade the older social frameworks of the large household. Conceding too much in an oddly self-abasing conclusion to his expansive account of literary servants, Bruce Robbins declares himself ‘ready to grant that I have not been talking about what is necessarily most complex, sophisticated, profound or even interesting in the English novel’. Do ...”

“... exactly a lost classic, as it is billed, since it was published in 1928, and again, in a slightly self-censored version, in 1968 – says he asked William Burroughs what he thought. ‘It’s the book that made me want to be a writer,’ Burroughs said. But was it poetry? ‘Of course it’s poetry. It rhymes.’ It is ‘closer to “Frankie and ...”

“... Zapata). It was characterised throughout by a quite astonishing degree of duplicity, cynicism, self-seeking, and uninhibited recourse to violence. Indeed, it so often appears to be no more than a protracted slugging-match between rival caudillos that it can be (and has been) questioned whether it should be called a revolution at all. Alan Knight, whose ...”

“... where their circumstances must be ‘less eligible’ than those of the lowest segment of self-supporting labour. Since in material terms the workhouse had to offer a sound roof and what was thought to be an adequate diet – features which many families of self-supporting labourers could not aspire to – it was ...”

“... couple, is comic, but also dangerous: any of the four characters may, at any time, lose all self-possession. As Avram says: ‘It’s incredible. No one has thrown anything.’ In these early stories, the reader, safely out of range of hurled objects, contemplates characters who consider themselves masters of their feelings, but whose lives can be ...”

“... want you to be. For women, not only women of the Third World, this is the most available form of self-preservation. The temporal form of the book is as intricately logical as electric wiring, moving not serially but in bundled threads between the area of darkness of the East and the often artificial light of America. From the electrical storm of ‘high ...”

“... the conventional utilitarian perspective of the age. ‘Utility, Power, Pain, Pleasure, Happiness, Self-interest, are all phrases to which any man may annex any meaning he pleases,’ he wrote in 1835. His identification of the implicit danger of tautology in the utilitarian account of human motivation was shrewd and pithy. ‘To say that when a man acts, he ...”