“... claims of chemotherapists and immunotherapists. The book is highly personal in tone with repeated, self-congratulatory references to Dr Israel’s own work and to that of his colleagues and friends. The language is often imprecise and the arguments ill-ordered, and it is difficult to agree with Susan Sontag’s statement on the front cover that it is ‘by far ...”

“... and who formed the backbone of Edgbaston society, cultivated education and the arts in their own self-conscious way, and developed an ethos which was often in deliberate contradiction to that of the class of Lord Calthorpe, the landlord who had made it all possible. The high noon of Victorian prosperity, which was also the golden age of Edgbaston, saw the ...”

“... The author of The Founder of Diabolism, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, was sentenced to three years for self-publishing and distributing a minor erotic work.There is a funny video clip imagining a young BL writer who has just passed the civil service exam seeking advice from a female lawyer:Writer: Can I continue writing sexy BL stories while working for the ...”

“... and writers about how to square up to it: at one extreme, miraculous feats of geo-engineering and self-imposed limits on climate-harming activity; at the other, massive investments in renewables to offset undiminished consumerism; between the two a range of positions including a plea for degrowth. This long conversation gave breadth and urgency to NLR’s ...”

“... The paintings of old people. The paintings of boys and young men. The paintings of old women. The self-portraits, the genre groups. I paid attention to the characterful frames, a wonderfully diverse array, some of them like no frames I have ever seen. I went back to my favourites, then round those pieces I thought I might have overlooked. My favourites ...”

“... late Sixties in order to record and illustrate what he calls ‘the professional transformation of self’. He presents a disturbing picture of the process of indoctrination. The trainee physician, educated in the mould of a traditional medical school with its strong biological approach to disease, finds himself confronted by patients whose disorders cannot be ...”

“... magic may have declined, what a magical word ‘revolution’ is. In a more or less stable but self-critical modern culture it is pregnant with easy excitement, and Hill conjures with it as with the philosopher’s stone, thus gilding his cloudily ambitious claims. But discussion of the intellectual influence of 1640-60 depends on the character that is ...”

“... rush of Tommy Morgan’s speech – a tumble of dialogue and incident – and the stately, more self-aware progress of Joan Poynder’s, in which ‘one’ deflects the possibility of disagreement. As well as a fairly predictable clutch of Cockney ‘aint’s’ and ‘cor blimey’s’, the upper-class liking for capacious derogatory adjectives ...”

“... everything. The earlier ones are sharper, more wittily observant of the astringencies and self-contradictions of the Scottish character. Yet even when he is at his most astringent the affection shows through. Some of the Scottish essays are simply evocations of a landscape, others are simply presentations of an idiosyncratic character. They have the ...”

“... and when she dies she is transmuted by Soueif into an object of reflection and reminiscence for a self-conscious narrator. This last gesture isn’t very convincing, as if the author had decided that she couldn’t leave Aisha to descriptive realism but at the last minute had to point out the presence of a significant narrative process. Fortunately, this bit ...”

“... an improbable-seeming name, perhaps, in this context – Menachem Begin’s White Nights. The self-excited, voyeuristic fervour of Norman Mailer’s reveries about crime and the nature of the criminal belong to another world entirely. Two final points. First: how foolish and dangerous it is, in thinking about the nature of the Soviet system, to minimise ...”

“... Designed as a sequel to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, it was an even more self-indulgent work, almost ignoring the philosophical tendencies and topics which had not greatly attracted my own interest. Nevertheless it has been well received, especially in the United States. An edition in paperback will soon be appearing in both ...”

“... would recount the story of the midnight confrontation with Profumo always in a shoulder-shrugging, self-mocking way: ‘My contribution was to type the statement.’ This was in character, for those who knew him better than I at the Telegraph claim that Deedes was inclined to run away from hard decisions of any sort. He seems to have the capacity both to ...”

“... the fern higher than our tents, growing among such beautiful trees. I could quite fancy my-self in a large English park.’ Given this acute sense of home, of what was left behind, it is all the more remarkable that Fanny Eden manages to order and express perceptions of her immediate surroundings with such energy, and even convert her occasional sense ...”

“... suggesting that Hamburg’s medical establishment clung to an exploded medical theory out of crude self-interest; nor is he postulating a Marxist notion of false consciousness: he is arguing – very convincingly – that medical conceptions are not autonomous, the sterile cultures of laboratories, but possess social roots and social functions. Koch had shown ...”