“... among the least vivid and successful. Each of the book’s chapters has the inner structure of a self-contained story, or anecdote, and in those dealing with the post-war period the threads are pulled together in a more commanding way, moving to a climax in which, in the second-to-last episode, a figure from the past, a former inspector of the laboratory at ...”

“... therapeutic, and meant that you could make it all end happily. The resulting book was morbid and self-indulgent, but I was, this time, shattered when it was rejected by all of six publishers. One could say that the good fortune of the moment was that the money ran out, and I had, finally, to consider the dreaded step of becoming professional in order to keep ...”

“... reasoning, and who are therefore incapable of tracing morality to its source in reasonable self-interest. Religion deserves toleration, when it is tolerant itself. Mr Delahunty’s monograph is similar in its aims to Jonathan Bennett’s recent A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics: both books examine Spinoza’s principal arguments in the spirit of ...”

“... Reuben Saidman, who worked for the picture papers that supplied Britain with a serial documentary self-portrait. Their work was often reproduced in the interlocking boxes and circles of composite picture pages, and the catalogue makes a rather heavy-handed comment on the nature of the editorial process by reproducing many of them with their original masking ...”

“... at moments when, by rights, she should simply be scared witless. At several points the writing is self-conscious and obtrusive in just the way that Jennifer Johnston’s isn’t: ‘And so she grieved on and on, the regrets rustling and sleek with life in the undergrowth of her mind, a myriad eyes on myriad worlds.’ Spring Sonata is an odd, fantastical ...”

“... whom Nathan overhears in the night trying to seduce or re-seduce the writer, and Lonoff’s self-effacing, depressed, bitter wife, who twice makes a scene in front of the young guest. The surface quality, partly naked and partly inscrutable, of such a domestic mess as it presents itself to an outsider is very truly registered. And there is excellent ...”

“... I have no clue – but this disorientation is part of the pleasure of following Reid around his self-created world. Hugo Williams’s Love-Life leaves much to be desired, like most people’s. I like the look of the book, and the illustrations by Jessica Gwynne. Williams himself writes the sort of poetry for which people used to be horribly ragged in ...”

“... one journey abroad, a Classical education and the experience of Scotland in its greatest days of self-esteem, when it could be believed that the answers to the social and moral problems of the new world of steam power and voting power might well be found there – all these enabled him not so much to transcend his geographical limitations as to use them as a ...”

“... reproducing the means of life to producing predominantly goods of symbolic value for expressive self-presentational purposes.’ So we may apply the analogy of semantics in order to understand societies. We shall find the meanings of social actions and speeches by looking for what Austin called their performative and illocutionary functions. The things that ...”

“... his native Elmet, Dylan Thomas’s half-loved Wales, Hartley’s sexy Norfolk, the Georgians’ self-conscious shires, Housman’s country of the broken heart. Grahame’s pagan Thames Valley and Orwell’s lost Oxfordshire village in Coming Up for Air – ‘one of the most powerful novels ever written about the threat to what we now call the ...”

“... tough, awkward youth, full of strong feelings and resentments, but he possessed a basic self-confidence rooted in a total acceptance of who and what he was. As a fighter, he was sometimes frightened, and he makes no bones about it. He was one of those detailed to kill British agents in their homes in the original Bloody Sunday of November 1920. In ...”

“... and of the pressures under which they operated. The style is the same as that of his earlier work: self-effacing, unemotional and efficient. The clash of ideas and personalities is relegated to the background; lines of institutional development and decision-making set the parameters of the story. One senses that precisely because of the highly-charged and ...”

“... cannot even find a week to take you to New Orleans? Why, when you are so intelligent, explain your self-destructiveness as though nothing was in your control? Why indulge your taste for sitting on rotten boughs and complain when they break beneath you? The abrogation of the conventions which distinguish writer and character spread this tetchiness. Kate’s ...”

“... Gaitskell’s death. It is a sweet moment for those of us who followed him. It would, however, be self-indulgent to savour it for too long. Hillhead has consolidated Jenkins’s claims to lead the SDP and the Alliance. It has not determined what sort of party the SDP is to be, or what strategy the Alliance is to follow. Since the launch of the party a year ...”

“... individual and public interest’ is brought about by ‘competitive markets and pursuit of self-interest by individuals’. Interestingly, a much smaller proportion of Conservative MPs accepted this claim; and among economists, business economists were more sceptical of it than others. Sen, while not denying all the often-praised virtues of the market ...”