“... Benighted in a mountain hut, the two women cleave to each other during a night of lesbian self-revelation which brings the prose to heights which the narrative and characterisation cannot carry. Anna’s over-warm narration put me unwillingly on the side of the life-deniers – if only she had been a little quieter. In Molly Keane’s pictures of ...”

“... how justified, has threatened to impose its own caustic limitations on her work. Atwood is too self-aware not to be alert to the risk. The Handmaid’s Tale attempted the scale of prophecy, a traditionally potent route for the disaffected.* Now Cat’s Eye turns from an imagined future to the recollected past, a Canadian childhood of the Forties and ...”

“... We have lost such confidence. Imperial decline and economic mismanagement have replaced historical self-congratulation with historical self-criticism. Middle-class virtues have become as unmentionable as aristocratic ones. And so the reputation of 1688 is once more in decline. Macaulay, hailing the uniqueness of England’s ...”

“... twisted in anxiety, his head in his hands.’ Benn’s re-education was never as spectacularly self-lacerating as Joseph’s; nevertheless, in so far as the Labour Party has a Joseph, it is Benn: both genuinely well-intentioned, both seekers after truth, both caught in hopelessly inconsistent political and intellectual positions. Paul Foot’s political ...”

“... certainly can’t. The accumulation of examples convinces me that James’s later style was often self-indulgent, and that he himself as a reader did not appreciate the virtues of his own earlier works – particularly when they were much earlier. There was often a distance of some thirty years between James the Reviser and James the First Author. One of the ...”

“... Francesca recalls Great Expectations. The grammar-school boy hero, Colin Ferguson, is the son of a self-improved, atheist, socialist, environmentalist schoolmaster father. The characterisations are as easy to take apart as lego, each piece a pet Scruton peeve. A sensitive youth, given to swooning when his problems press, Colin falls in love with the beautiful ...”

“... and are prevented by the country’s constitution from arming for any other purpose than immediate self-defence. But their ease has been increasingly disturbed. The United States has wanted to reduce its trading deficit with Japan. It has also been asking Tokyo to make a larger contribution to the wider defence of North-East Asia. By the early Eighties, the ...”

“... present participle which too often impart a leaden rhythm to his prose. The danger of this art is self-parody, but Ballard is often at his most effective when he is parodying other people’s styles. He frequently uses the diary or logbook as a narrative form, and in War Fever he develops an incisive vein of political satire. The volume also contains witty ...”

“... monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up private life. It proves he was right about everything, and it regains him (immediately) his wife’s love and respect and sexual favours. Amazing how useful public calamities can be once you get the hang of them. The largest ...”

“... pro-American not pro-European, often but not always Jewish, sometimes but not invariably self-made, anti-élitist, didn’t belong to the Athenaeum, didn’t go to the opera. Ranelagh gives a flavour of some of the higher idiocies that peppered the dialogue of some of these dreamers. Norman Strauss, a former Unilever manager and an early Thatcher ...”

“... with William Huntington, S.S. The ‘S.S.’ stood for Sinner Saved, and Huntington was a large, self-appointed noise, evangelising throughout the 1790s from his chapel in Great Titchfield Street. There came from his pen a torrent of pamphlets, sermons, admonitions and expostulations of a loud and windy nature. The wind blew from an antinomian quarter ...”

“... the population was enmeshed in an alternative power network. The story of this struggle for self-definition and counter-definition is awash with hunting terms: chases, beaters, tracking, driving, baiting, trapping. Gradually, the hunted became the hunters. The outlaws learned to assert a law of their own – of legitimate ...”

“... South Coast. As a writer’s life of a certain kind – centrifugal, ‘simple’ in its attempted self-sufficiency – it is formidable, exemplary. For the biographer, it has a deal to offer: a subject with a cult following, but also with a certain amount of slack in his reputation (‘almost certainly Lowry is the least-known British literary genius of the ...”

“... For a while Crick turned his attention to the origin of life (defined as the origin of the self-replicating molecules of DNA and RNA) and went so far as to suggest ‘directed panspermia’ – the seeding of Earth with self-replicating gemmules of nucleic acids from outer space – to account for it. But more and ...”

“... Some decades coincide with historical periods, give or take a year or two. The Twenties were self-contained as the era between the Great War and the world slump, and the Thirties a loaded pause between one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with the euphoria of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964 ...”