“... Margaret is in the foreground, spotlit, while behind her Glenconner’s life plays out with such self-effacing matter-of-factness that it takes time for the reader to realise that of these two intertwined biographies Glenconner’s is by far the more remarkable. The book is not, as a whole, what the publishers have made it appear – another gossipy ...”

“... a young woman, whom he finds quite attractive, that the local diet of bread and bean paste seems self-mortifying. She reproves his unbridled appetites, then startles him by asking how a wish ‘to grip me tight and push part of your body into me’ comports with admiration for the beautiful and the good.Simón’s ...”

“... propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t follow through the consequences of his rueful acknowledgment of Strauss’s overriding compositional energy.) Some passages from this mainly dull material are well worth revival. The composer ...”

“... What would have been an invaluable record of Charles Burney’s indefatigable efforts at self-advancement was replaced by her Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832), a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a ...”

“... matters considerably, forcing a direct confrontation between the principle of equality and that of self-determination that I do not propose to resolve here. He is wrong to assume that ‘the vast majority of Iraqis want … the equal treatment of all Iraqis regardless of sex, religion and so forth.’ In the latest election, the majority of Iraqis voted for ...”

“... this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be ...”

“... for his heterogeneous essays of the 1950s, assembled as The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self. The ‘Honest Men’ were generalists, men of letters and purveyors of opinion in a tradition which emerged early in the 19th century with Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle and J.S. Mill, and in the 20th century included Orwell. Their idea-mongering ...”

“... the action to a single day is a mild piece of formalism, certainly when compared with some self-imposed contortions, but it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident patterns of significance. What happens in Ulysses? Even if you accept Hugh Kenner’s explanation for the unfamiliar ...”

“... for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s life, but also in the relevant scholarship about 20th-century Britain, higher education, and the long agonies of the ...”

“... family and is known to friends and relatives as ‘Milk Butter’ because she is spoiled and self-indulgent; Zikora is a pragmatic lawyer at a prestigious DC law firm who yearns to have a picture-perfect family; Omelogor is a brash investment banker in Abuja who launders money for Nigerian politicians and redistributes funds to poor women (she calls the ...”

“... publisher and performs poetry readings at children’s camps – and her monologue is vicious and self-pitying. Her resentment at what she sees as her children’s slovenliness and entitlement generates plenty of cynical aphorisms about family life: ‘Men are like road signs; children mark chronology’; ‘Love them – they’ll torture you; don’t love ...”

“... now appear at the helm of a series that proposes to span the centuries, Medieval to Modern. The self-questioning that must have gone on before he led, or figureheaded, a number of volumes offering ‘Literature in History’ is indicated in his three-page General Editor’s Preface, where he hints, but does not spell out for the uninitiated, that it is too ...”

“... Mozart. But the wonderful clear lines of the poetry carry a note of hesitancy, of the lack of self-knowledge behind Salieri’s bleak and self-righteous convictions. Is he perhaps animated by low envy, the involuntary hatred of the lesser for the great? The piece ends with such questions hanging in the air, and in our ...”

“... but intensitive parental ‘ejections’ of Jane from childhood on to explain the withdrawn, self-protective manner of the adult woman. They were ‘frightening and unpleasant experiences over which she had no control and which required periods of recovery; they helped to form the “whimsical girl”, almost always well defended when it came so showing ...”

“... have been the subject, if not the pretext, for a Stoppard play. Burnett is neither coy nor unduly self-reflexive about the task of editing the most exacting of editors. He takes the pressure, and he takes the pressure off, by being at once thorough and painstaking with the required information, and by occasionally aping Housman’s gleeful knockdown ...”