“... on the cultural divide. What he said in the 1959 Rede Lecture seemed to me to be so reasonable and self-evident that I found the dissent of Leavis and others surprising in its passion and sincerity, and, even more, its imprecision and lack of focus. But with this book Snow himself missed an opportunity to straddle the two cultures. In the early part of this ...”

“... bulbs from one VIP airport lounge to another. Especially as it is not always easy to share their self-pity: that, in their depths, both Sellers and Burton were racked with nostalgia for the great days of Major Bloodnok and Henry V, and also with regret at having come so far to have arrived nowhere as good, is something with which we can only briefly ...”

“... of frivolity because it had nothing more to offer than common sense.’ Ah. He practises the usual self-compiler’s device of using his introduction to review his book: ‘I hope that the truly serious reader will be able to detect, in even the least grave of the following essays, a certain disinclination to make cheap jokes, or at any rate a determination to ...”

“... It makes one yearn to collapse at once between linen sheets smoothed by Mrs Stephen and give one-self up in gratitude to the calm, unhurried, reassuring presence, the therapeutic rubbings and the beef tea. The section on the removal of crumbs from the bed is a masterpiece. This is the voice of a woman for whom the unsentimental alleviation of distress in ...”

“... had perhaps become rotted by peace. Now, proclaimed the poets, was the chance for a proud and self-confident people to show themselves worthy of their ancestors, to meet any test, to bear any burden, to make any sacrifice to preserve their honour. England had been at peace for a hundred years; too long, perhaps, for its own good. Through war, her ...”

“... something like conscience. The charm turns out to be a stalking-horse, a method of persuasion, the self-conscious defensive/protective mechanism characteristic of all exploited groups, a composite of Jewish charm, Black charm, Irish charm, Hispanic charm, female charm. It is part of the apparatus of the tragic sense of life. Technically, Grace Paley’s work ...”

“... that can’t be touched’) were not so well drawn, the slide from confusion and depression into self-starvation would be inexplicable. As it is, the stratagems Willa uses to avoid eating, and to avoid confronting the fact that she is starving herself to death, come to seem psychologically credible: you begin to see why not eating might seem the only thing ...”

“... kind. Jack is the standard-model wild novelist, Sarah is determined to ‘keep her painting self intact’, and gets help from a German refugee art teacher who says Ach and Ja. Rows, love affairs, success for both follow. Sarah sells pictures, Jack becomes New Zealand’s senior novelist, wins a Commonwealth Prize for literature, drops dead at 52. As ...”

“... and a concern for the cultivation of feelings as it was by any commitment to the premises of self-interest and rational calculation ... This is a widely ramifying theme, discussion of which must inevitably be open-ended and somewhat untidy ... I am suggesting that the ideal of character ... enjoyed a prominence in the political thought of the Victorian ...”

“... he produced 21 paintings in eight months for the monastery of San Pablo el Real. He was largely self-taught but quickly absorbed the naturalism and light effects of Velázquez, who had established his reputation in Seville a few years earlier, as well as the drama of Juan Martínez Montañés’s candlelit polychrome sculptures. Zurbarán added a ...”

“... in the North of England by the Conservatives. Denunciations of Labour’s metropolitan self-satisfaction were interrupted occasionally by vague speculation as to whether Scotland’s recovery from the pandemic might be ruined by the ‘distraction’ of a vote on independence. English voters don’t get much Scottish news, but Scottish voters get ...”

“... Fragonard in his bones, alongside Renoir, Redon, Miró, Dufy. Again, at the level of opinion and self-reflection Dubuffet was undoubtedly sincere in his wish to escape from that inheritance – he spent much of his career pouring scorn on the paintings he saw on the Rive Gauche – but he was no kind of fool: he knew full well that every movement of his ...”

“... but it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. A rat will do, we don’t need a Dostoevskyan self-hating rat. So what has Douglas done? He has manipulated Turner not for her sake but for the sake of his film; stolen a script and idea from Sullivan the director (‘Without me it would have stayed an idea’); and arranged for Powell’s dippy wife (very ...”