“... American Right brings one inevitably back to Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. For grandiose self-regard, pomposity of expression and insistence on seeing himself as a martyr and/or unhonoured prophet, Podhoretz is in a class of his own. One marvels at the conceit of an article like the one entitled ‘J’ Accuse’ (Commentary, September 1982), which ...”

“... is finite but unbounded is based on his plumping for Euclidean space-time. Admittedly, he avoids self-contradiction by associating Euclidean space-time with ‘quantum gravity’ which goes beyond ‘everyday quantum mechanics’, but he just passes over the promotion of Euclidean space-time from a mathematical device to a physical reality. I am not ...”

“... Oliver’), and offers me a cigarette. There is also in the monologue an in-built tendency to self-indulgence. Oliver’s laboured metaphor – ‘Life is like invading Russia’ – goes on for ten lines. It is justified, I suppose, as an insight into Oliver’s thought-habits. It is, as he puts it, one of his ‘riffs’. But when do people actually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is called ‘Self-Congratulatory Ode ...’, but it is the purr of mutual congratulation which is deafening. ‘Parody is frequently welcomed by its victims, who recognise it as a compliment, however backhanded.’ Christopher Reid touches on all this, not backhandedly but ...”

“... of nature (unfair) or of art (deceitful). But their deepest objection seems to be to the urge for self-creation that women express through clothes, make-up and dieting. This has to be wrong because it is done for the benefit of the oppressor – the male sex. How to explain, then, the importance of beauty in the gay world? Lakoff and Scherr argue that gay men ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in brief bouts of beating Sabina, which don’t seem like much of a departure from his ordinary self – unless we think the difference between the quiet autocrat and the violent one is the difference that counts. Sabina meanwhile matures, becomes an analyst, marries and is pregnant when we last see her. If her madwoman is a bit stereotypical at the ...”

“... right to point to massive tax evasion on the part of Greek shipowners, wealthy businessmen and the self-employed, particularly lawyers and doctors (as few as a third of the latter declare incomes of more than 12,000 euros) as one of the principal reasons for the current debt mountain. Greece really is a country in which only the little people pay taxes. It ...”

“... come with three acres and a pile of manure, but the first garden city had its own version of civic self-sufficiency. Construction began in 1903 after a competition to design a town that demonstrated the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform was loosely based on the work of Henry George and, following George’s ...”