“... from the Publishers’ Weekly, sales are so good that the project is well on the way to becoming self-sustaining, and that in all but one exceptional case they badly underestimated the print-runs of the early volumes. They already have designs on the heritage of American painting. I suppose the normal British reaction to all this would be to point out that ...”

“... of the personal anarchy of unsettled modern life’ and represented the ‘vulgar push and self-interest that was changing the nature of English society’. But those comments occur in Midnight Oil: Pritchett is too finely scrupulous an artist to blur his story’s sharp focus with authorial interpolations – and he also relishes the vitality, however ...”

“... a tense, difficult relationship between two human beings who are aware of shifting senses of the self and capable of both love and hate – very like, in fact, what we hear of affairs and their sudden revulsions of feeling in Doris Lessing’s more realistic novels. Well, if it doesn’t fit, so much the worse for the fable. What would have been proved by a ...”

“... with life. Photography was yet another means by which this dramatist could stage his art and this self-styled “worker” could be an artist.’ This is Elsen’s final summing-up of Rodin’s use of photographs. The attempt to make art-photographs to which Elsen alludes, and which began as an imitation of art, has always been paralleled by photography used ...”

“... is always dreamland.’ A rather Barrie-like observation: but if Reid was timid and not without self-pity, he was not a sentimentalist. He found a complex resource in a Proustian obsession with memory, and a curiosity about Time. In one of his much praised later novels, Uncle Stephen, there is this passage: Could you be in two times at once? Certainly your ...”

“... latest book in English, Nostalgia for the Present, one has an impression of vanity and self-indulgence mostly unmitigated by poetic wit, verbal ability or irony. Often he attempts themes that are seriously beyond him – being quite at variance with the level of his writing: a casual style with rhetorical and surrealistic impulses. There are poems ...”

“... himself would want to see laboured. The catalogue he has produced is disarmingly reticent and self-effacing, as scholarly and informative as we would expect from him, but leaving the paintings and his choice of them to prompt us to do much of the work which, in another catalogue, would have been attempted by a critical introduction. His own introduction ...”

“... There has been wider use of comedy drawn from the mechanics of the show itself: internal mix-ups; self-conscious reference to the sketch while it is playing; the use of devices to undermine the device. It could be said that this is the world of late Modernism and Brechtian influence, but there is no need to say this: the Marx Brothers and the Goons were ...”

“... original form, startling and unassimilated) and the odd burst of action from Wyndham Lewis, the self-styled skeleton in the cupboard, his three protagonists are Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. Nash’s was a fine sensibility and Nicholson’s lyrical gifts are husbanded with a rigour rare in this country’s art: yet, of the three, it is only ...”

“... or insensitivity, he shrinks from the truth of experience. There is also, arguably, a paradoxical self-regard in the apparent objectivity. Daniel, the narrator, at one point remarks to his father that his difficulty, as an author, lies in writing ‘not about what I feel and think, but what someone else does’ His taut, scrupulous registering of lame ...”

“... unlike Ian Kennedy’s. Of course, compared to what Szasz fed Kennedy, the food which the self-supporting Szasz received from Freud is mere sweets and biscuits (candy and cookies to him), nor does he ever misrepresent Freud’s thought as his. The psychological reminder remains that whenever we feel like biting, we might usefully ask ourselves ...”

“... had included, not only the house, but a park and broad acres, integrated into a coherent and often self-sufficient estate: it was the expression of a landed social order and an aristocratic polity in which broad acres still spelt economic security, social prestige and political influence. Country houses were still power houses, where ministries might be made ...”

“... than a yard outside a stable. But the faces of the men are on the whole stern with defiance and self-importance, or grim with the humiliation of defeat. The women, too, have a dignity which is not derived solely from their voluminous skirts and elaborate bonnets. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors. It is hard for the reader, looking at ...”

“... that the books ‘are without exception personal’; that they are ‘neither straightforward nor self-explanatory’ and have ‘an especial unlikeness to anyone else’s writing’; that ‘they rarely conform to the classic genres.’ There is exaggeration here, but part of the emphasis is just. Ruskin’s forms are often unusual, and in several ...”

“... an unfamiliar item of conversation – martyrdom to class struggle. Mackay excels at a comedy of self-abasement, intermittently deprecating and cruel. But unhappily she has a propensity for overkill. Bad jokes sneak in and the insubstantial narrative indicates weakness. Pearl’s lodger attempts to seduce her but in vain, despite a liberal sprinkling of ...”