“... their brutal calamities and our own world. The concept has become an accessory to complacency and self-satisfaction. Anderson asserts that just as charisma cannot be counterposed to traditional bases of authority, neither can it be divorced from the rational-legal order. If Hitler was the ultimate charismatic figure, he was equally a product of just those ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”

“... Dr Sarkhou is a dapper man. With his smart suit and manicured moustache he looks every bit the self-assured consultant, the established performer on the international conference circuit. But as he talks his emollient manner slips, his frustration at the insensitivity of Kuwait’s rulers grows. ‘It’s taken them a year to set up an official psychiatric ...”

“... the reader by her normality, to a greater extent even than do accounts of the American poet. Self-groomed like her hairstyle and worn like a twinset, her intensity seems healthy and normal, as it seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in ...”

“... of the Levellers. That is no longer so. The Seventies saw a revival of the movement for Scottish self-government. There can be no Scottish devolution without an element of a written constitution, bringing with it the power of the courts – or of a specially constituted court – to interpret the terms of whatever Scotland Act is in force. It is highly ...”

“... that needs to be administered vaginally’ – is lost beneath the weight of the character’s self-pity. In short, the author is everywhere and nowhere in this novel. For ever wriggling inside his characters in order to ventriloquise his own aphorisms, he can never get enough distance from them to grasp the real foolishness or enormity of their ...”

“... three resident Serbian families and one Croat. The Partisans may have carried the idea of local self-management down from the mountains with the ideological fervour of Marxists, but here power was still yoked to ethnicity. Ironically, a Jew saved Nikola Blazevic’s life. As railway superintendent, Blazevic had used his prior notice of plans for the ...”

“... a level and left the fundamental problems unsolved’. ‘Too high a level’ was the level of self-reflection – knowledge of one’s states of consciousness. This leaves quite untouched the prior question of the nature of the mental states themselves – the pains, the tickles, the seeings of red, the smellings of roses. How do these spring from mere ...”

“... his longing to reveal himself, in his writing, was made difficult by an equally strong fear of self-revelation. This is not a new concept – something very similar was seen by Winnicott as constituting the basic psychological make-up of all artists – but that doesn’t make it any less plausible. What, then, were the childhood experiences that led to ...”

“... years. And it contained, as it almost always does, a strong grain of sense beneath the deliberate self-parody. He is right that something must be seriously wrong when a senior British journalist can prefer to edit the Mail rather than the Times. (Indeed, he might have added that matters are even worse when his own editor-in-chief, Max Hastings, rejects the ...”

“... charabanc as it makes its amiable progress through the better journals. The tone is a pert self-argument, a kind of educated mutter, as if life presented itself to Enright as an exam that needed to be marked – one can hear the tick and scrape of the red pen. In ‘Confetti’, for instance, the poet calls a taxi to take him and his pregnant wife to ...”

“... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...”

“... another by letter. At Christmas, after a debasing night with a senator, Vera, in a drunken act of self-abasement, sends them each a card: ‘I’m no fucking good. Make me an offer.’ The horrified siblings at once join forces to wrest the property away from her. Her brother Tom writes her an officious letter, declaring that the hotel will be sold by auction ...”

“... a second language has mattered so greatly to us. When I look a long way back, to disinter my child-self first becoming attached to French at the age of nine or ten, I fancy I find it becoming newly detached at the same time from English, as if first meeting up with a foreign language meant also coming to a more fastidious view of language as such: a great ...”

“... stuff, though it went down well at the time, but it shows the eye for strong effects and rather self-consciously powerful situations which Hughes was to construct in his last unfinished trilogy, and in ideas for the films and plays which he kept attempting to write throughout his career. What constitutes a Jamesian clou, even in that crudely dramatic ...”