“... 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 ...”

“... expense than importing it from abroad would entail. It was part of the country’s drive for self-sufficiency. The result was a permanent fuel shortage. Although Albania now imports most of its oil with Western help, hundreds of oil derricks are still nodding away, pumping up oil that has no market. Rivers of crude just continue to flow, slowly seeping ...”

“... his acknowledgment that it shows perfectly the narrator ‘in his real colours, as the fantastic self wno hates and refuses contact with reality.’ The combination of that reality-hating self with a relentlessly logical mind finicky in its demand for accuracy gives Poe’s most outrageous stories their unique flavour, and ...”

“... of powerlessness: the powerlessness of the subject, whether alive or not, to detach him or her self from the simulacrum that is being produced. Sometimes Hugh David loses confidence in his own process, and has to reassure himself and the reader by repeating a catchphrase of the period at the end of a paragraph. Today the Struggle ... or, rather ...”

“... language generally devoted to notions of stubborn defensiveness (‘stonewalling’), or patient, self-denying collaboration (‘keeping your end up’), or long experience (‘a good innings’), or humorous cunning (‘yorker’, ‘googly’, ‘chinaman’), or occasional bafflement (‘stumped’), and only in a few instances of vainglorious triumph ...”

“... Sarah does not find fulfilment with either of her new loves. What she does find is knowledge, self-knowledge first and then knowledge of others. She perceives that the small theatrical company she had worked with for years in a close and productive professional relationship had been a family for her, a product of the kind of healing substitution that ...”

“... leave it for others to enjoy. But even nationalist destruction took second place to mercantile self-interest. Roofs were dismantled, window-frames stripped from walls and plumbing torn out of floors and carted away. Some looted for profit; others hoped they could refabricate homes elsewhere, in the shells of buildings destroyed after their Muslim owners ...”