“... blurb. The translators assure us of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi’s ‘meticulous attention to detail, the self-revealing thoughtfulness of his reflections, and the acuity of his observation’. The photograph on the cover shows him unprepared for this cascade of compliments, sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of ...”

“... of January 1906. In Volume Two of the diary Beatrice had already escaped from the neurotic self-analysis and sense of guilt which had characterised the first instalment; now in Volume Three we are aware of a confident, outgoing, independent-minded and very sociable woman approaching her fifties. In these entries, even before the defeat of the Balfour ...”

“... proudly to their grannies, ex-husbands, and the like. These sensitives were now exposed as shoddy self-deluders. Auden understood about the real, the hidden and depressed, readership for poetry: these poets of 1969 were even more hidden, more depressed and very likely ate in even nastier cafeterias than the types Auden had in mind. They had probably never ...”

“... usual sense of sin and sexual guilt. On a working holiday in France with a husband whom she finds self-absorbed and unsympathetic, she is planning to break the news to him at any moment that she is leaving him for her lover in California. But Alex, as the book opens, runs straight into a disastrous accident: a motorboat rams him head-on while he is ...”

“... are familiar to excess with its traits of impatience and hysteria, arbitrariness and that heedless self-assertion which goes under the mystifying name of ‘will power’, to which is added a strong does of self-pity: ‘He says that the weeks since 20 July [1944] have been the worst of his life. He has fought and won a ...”

“... impression is not of a man driven to testify but of a practised, cunning and profoundly self-conscious artist. The stories are always readable but this is often achieved by mere literary skill and one feels cheated rather than enriched at the end. There are several reasons for this disparity. One is the influence of Hemingway and Lardner. The faux ...”

“... like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction – the self-confidently didactic style of S. L. Aluko, the engineer who wrote One Man, One Wife and One Man, One Matchet, informing the outside world about Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke. Like Aluko (or Henry ...”

“... them are crude. Hammett’s ‘stark realism’ and ‘plausibility’ are repeatedly invoked as self-evident indicators of merit; it’s ‘imaginative’ but ‘misguided’ to interpret Red Harvest as a Marxist parable because the union leader in that novel is ‘a hollow idealist whose arguments are unpersuasive’ and because ‘there are no masses of ...”

“... be ‘such a questionable shape’ On essentialism Ayer is uncompromisingly faithful to his early self and, as in much else, to Hume. The only necessities he is prepared to recognise, apart from the formally logical or mathematical, are those which analytically link, or separate, descriptions. Here he is, at least superficially, at odds with current doctrines ...”

“... persons at the expense of the community. Neither does the sense of justice proceed wholly from self-interest, though self-interest plays a leading part in its formation. The position is that because of his physical weakness a man can survive and prosper only as a member of a group, and that the scarcity of goods which ...”

“... letter to the Times focused on the way this artful rogue weaved potted criminology into his self-exoneration. In the Sutcliffe case, the public, widely welcomed a verdict of criminal responsibility and appeared to get some amusement from the judicial humiliation of the psychiatrists who sought to portray him as the hapless victim of his own ...”

“... Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a resilient veteran of many tumbles in such tourneys, and he seems to thrive on them, but because he is engaged on a scholarly patch that Dame Helen has made peculiarly her own (the prose of ...”

“... work, Towards the Great Civilisation, Radji could spot the Chalfont-Kim Il Sung shoot-self-in-foot syndrome and hastened to Ashraf’s side. He produces some pretty strong arguments against doing the book, but not enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled ...”

“... that Scott was a liar, fraud, sponger and crook and dismissed Andrew Newton as a perjurer and a self-advertising ‘chump’. This wasn’t the whole content of his very long summing-up, and at one time, as Waugh shows, he seemed to be suggesting to the jury that there had been a conspiracy to kill and not (as the defence suggested) to frighten. But the ...”

“... 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually intrepid and ...”