“... Central European, but surely Viennese – an amiable flibbertigibbet, equally futile and self-regarding; and the portraits are all the more effective for the unresentful forbearance which Ruth contriyes to exert. The period Fifties to Seventies, I suppose; the setting Chelsea and Paris; the atmosphere and detail extremely authentic; we never find ...”

“... there was no destiny, merely fate. For Yeats, authority was not exclusively a matter of self-discipline: it also implied the subjugation of others to precisely those forces which the self had, in achieving freedom, overcome. Or, on the other hand, there were those who surrendered their freedom, the possibility of ...”

“... of a Bildungsroman, with her experience offering Felicitas first an approach to God and then to self-discovery: but it’s experience subject to such strange emphases, and so distorted for purely satirical purposes, that Felicitas’s naivety is seen to be not hers so much as a necessary structural device, as in a latterday Candide. Father Cyprian, with his ...”

“... must reconcile ourselves to the fact that electronic man does not in all ways share our view of self and world. The majority of readers of the LRB will no doubt sigh regretfully in sympathy, but if I read Bolter correctly, it is not only the humanist who is thus challenged. ‘The issue is not whether the computer can be made to think like a human, but ...”

“... rates. Yet homeopathy very soon felt itself pinched between practice and orthodox inflation. Once self-styled scientific medicine came to run the health cartel the most percipient attacks on its authority have seldom come from those with shares in the monopoly. Doctors have been understandably quiet about their interests. Even their most strongly argued cases ...”

“... on the surface, perhaps, but profoundly significant when viewed from the standpoints of male self-identity and of national self-image. There is no doubt that the hair-cutting order drove many communities that might have surrendered peacefully into open and usually fatal resistance to the newly appointed magistrates of ...”

“... if they think the money can be better spent on other forms of advertising – in short, wholly self-interested. No sponsor backs adventurousness, with the risk of failure: a good Arts Council is one that is willing to do exactly that. However, Rees-Mogg, who insists that he is not political, believes that subsidy ‘weakens the sinews of ...”

“... evolution that lasted half a century, railway stations became, both in grandiloquent and in self-effacing modes, the characteristic public buildings of the age, expressing that mélange of optimism, fancy and thoroughness so dissimilar from our own climate of feeling. What better venue than the Gare d’Orsay for the museum of the 19th century which has ...”

“... night Harriet comes back from the dead Guy goes off to give his Egyptian students a lecture on self-determination. Why do we remain interested in this well-meaning insufferable prig and the girl who is soft enough to put up with him? Why do we remain fascinated by their ambience – the inessential auxiliaries of a semi-colonial regime? At the beginning of ...”

“... have when awake at dawn or sleepless in the small hours of the morning, or whenever the faculty of self-deception that so often insulates us from real life is temporarily in abeyance. For me, the gravest of these black morning thoughts is that the future of England and, ecumenically speaking, of the world depends upon the decisions of party politicians such as ...”

“... attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his friends’ kindness – their nursing, gifts of money, oysters and port – by making them verse-offerings and penning ...”

“... book. In the upshot Pauline hardly behaves sensibly, but she has reached a measure of self-approval, which is hard come by in Rathmines. In the fiction of Richard Yates we are down among the half-lives (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Young Hearts Crying): New Yorkers who are hopeful as kids, humiliated as adolescents, uncommunicative as ...”

“... poets (Hamilton was an early failed one), could turn their sense of the awfulness of things and of self into quietly aesthetic relish and enjoyment, or – in Baudelaire’s case – a resonant panache. Hamilton lacked even that compensatory refuge: no doubt because in his case a full transmutation into art, with all its paradoxical liberations and ...”

“... political malpractice of deficit public finance to pay for current public consumption rather than self-redeeming investment. Galbraith denounces defence spending in particular, but of course in recent years transfer payments to individuals have annually exceeded the defence budget. In that regard it is most revealing that even at a time of prolonged ...”

“... and Williams are better than the movies,’ O’Hara, unlike Ginsberg, couldn’t use the rolling self-importance of Whitman – any more than Keats could use the ‘egotistical sublime’ of Wordsworth. Like Keats, he rejected poetry that had ‘a palpable design’ on us. But he could learn from Williams’s relaxed intimacy with places and things; and he ...”