“... about psychoanalysis and the significance of its history. Given that ambivalence, and therefore self-doubt, are integral to the theory, it is remarkable how unwilling psychoanalysts have been to write anything about their hatred, or their love, of psychoanalysis. It would be particularly interesting for those who love psychoanalysis to tell us their ...”

“... The Sense of an Ending, but has no difficulty whatever in demonstrating that it is often naive and self-contradictory. In his long struggle for an intelligent view of realism, of language and especially literary language as intimately related to the world we live in, he has developed formidable machinery and uses it with gusto and learning. Why then a certain ...”

“... have been deployed; but Keynesian remedies dismissed – whilst markets have been denied any self-stabilising properties. The book is a bran tub of pessimism. For most outsiders, this is of little import, and one set of doom merchants must be much like another. But this is not the case. For Rees-Mogg and Davidson have a great rival in peddling doom, one ...”

“... encouraging any such trace on the reader’s face is even more so. Any sneers that do arise are self-induced, the product of an ideology considerably meaner than the expedition’s. Captain ‘Titus’ Oates is afraid to remove his sock lest his gangrened toes come with it. ‘Do you reckon a man without feet could still ride to hounds?’ he jokes, and is ...”

“... is not in any meaningful sense a war novel. It is an artistically artful vision of a child’s self-protective reaction to a life totally disrupted, in part fiction, yet only dubiously a novel. When J.G. Ballard decided to use the material of his early life as basis for a prose work (and the decision must have been difficult and painful), he must have ...”

“... blames the collapse of Communism on the strength of the American dollar and on Gorbachev, the ‘self-important fool’ with ‘birdshit on his head’ who got into bed with Reagan and Bush. His one remaining hero is the late Nicolae Ceausescu, a ‘mad hog’ no doubt, but ‘at least he had a bit of spine’ when his former henchmen turned against him. For ...”

“... never know what’s really going on so they are easy to trick), and a greater readiness for self-sacrifice. Of course men sacrifice themselves too, and they get to do it with panache, their sacrifice crowned either with success or by a hero’s death. Noble women, on the other hand, are ‘presented as slogging on ... and on and on’. No wonder women ...”

“... 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 ...”