“... as many of the subjects it covers are of immediate relevance and are suppressed by a kind of self-imposed official secrets act. He omits to describe his journey to Cathay since he doesn’t want the Greeks to know how he got there, which is a disappointment to the novel-reader, though a cunning indication of how historical texts can be limited by ...”

“... down and realises that he has made his name. So many of Carlyle’s difficulties and agonies seem self-created. The condition of the manuscript must be whatever explanation there can be for its destruction. Travel to the north, certainly rigorous when done as cheaply as possible, produced long lists of complaints from both Carlyle and Jane. Was his health as ...”

“... problem is intensified by the large claims which the publishers make on behalf of their series. A self-confessed revision crammer might be undesirable, but it would be relatively harmless – a book in whose company candidates could while away the final weeks before the exam itself. But ‘course companions and study guides’ are in danger of doing much more ...”

“... to become the tools of foreign surveillance?’ There was no doubt a chauvinistic element in this self-image of the free-born Englishman, but the benefit to the political refugees was unquestionable, and their experiences were less contradictory or paradoxical than many of them thought. They enjoyed, or endured, the toleration born of indifference. They had ...”

“... of the Lock (Pope’s), Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t know the average May mornynge temperature of the British Isles ...”

“... how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with some justice, are a ...”

“... serving officers to discuss their profession in print. These scribbling fellows could be ruthless self-advertisers, like Churchill and Baden-Powell. There was nothing wrong with an officer giving himself a manly pseudonym and writing about pig-sticking in Blackwood’s – or, of course, with a general writing his memoirs on retirement. Today serving officers ...”

“... For what did Bunting earn in royalties through the first 65 years of his life? And how can such a self-denying or self-defeating career be accounted for, in a survey that concentrates on how a poet finds, or woos, or fabricates a readership? Presumably Bunting’s royalty statements look more rosy since Briggflatts. (And ...”

“... our slippery language is honourable: but when it leads him to such impractical stringencies, it is self-defeating. Moreover, what we call ‘stringencies’ may as well be called, if we shift the focus only a little, ‘self-indulgences’. In some of the earlier and less strenuous essays here, he shows he can recognise with ...”

“... unconquerable air of slightly arrogant courtesy and extreme intelligence. I suspect this apparent self-possession was often hard-won. His lot was a lonely one. His power of abstract concentration was legendary, but in the right company he could be gregarious and convivial. His life in China did not give all that much of a chance. I was often acutely aware ...”

“... to social discourse, in all spheres of moral life. Such an account of the latitude for self-determination within the grip of the social and the discursive is of some practical moment for current controversy over sexual ethics, simply because history puts paid to the idea that an ethics of sexual behaviour can ever be grounded in empirical claims as ...”

“... within universities who speak of English literature – from another she is importantly and not self-importantly a citizen of the world. The term naturally has its good-natured comedy, and she describes it – when conferred by Goldsmith on his visiting Chinaman, a penetrating watcher of 18th-century English civilisation – as ‘a phrase both levelling ...”

“... harrowing record could not have been done except in verse (its clipped cadences shutting out any self-pity, any rhetorical elaboration). As a pitilessly unsensational chronicle of what a working-class childhood could be in the England of the 1920s, it is irreplaceable. But is it in any real sense poetry? And from where I stand I have to judge that it ...”

“... we diagnose, at the very least, a stamp-collector. Does one sense limitation, then, however self-imposed and selective? Cautious fact-finding rather than complex truth-seeking? Sight (and a sharp sense of sight at that) rather than insight? ‘1863-1915’ had aroused one’s suspicions, anyhow: what’s wrong with 1919-1979? Why, for that ...”

“... novel ever is – into the cultural mainstream, largely as a result of Capote’s shrewd gift for self-promotion. Capote’s gifts as a stylist and storyteller are more accessible in his second novel – novella, really – The Grass Harp, and in his early stories. Like his debut, The Grass Harp concerns the childhood of a sensitive Southern male orphan ...”