“... 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 ...”

“... characters’ own consciousness. Beneath a deceptively artless manner these tales are immensely self-conscious. Most English or French novelists write with an unspoken confidence that their own cross-section of humanity can stand well enough for the whole. Updike, in common with most American writers, is acutely aware that this is America, in the fourth ...”

“... suspect that it is ‘an image of a place or condition they wished one day to arrive at, in full self-possession’. This belief renders the poet’s function pretty obscure. To credit the intuitive writer, as Redgrove seems to, with intuitive physical powers seems both sentimental and negative. It is as though a poet were no more than a dowser or ...”

“... Retrospect’ in The Modern Churchman), that he could not have ‘brought himself to the necessary self-exposure; nor did he aim at accommodating his views to those of others ... He was not made that way. Compromise or concession to majority views were not for him.’ One is bound to contrast the temper of other prophets of the same generation (and what giants ...”

“... inquisitive by nature’; ‘like so many talkative people ... Pandolfo must have felt pleasantly self-important.’ Similarly, when the action threatens to flag, Cipolla stokes it up again by imaginative use of dramatic hyperbole, generally of the Mills and Boon variety: ‘He had not slept at all during the night and now in less than 24 hours he had ...”

“... were very great, and there was much hysteria to match the heroism, personal greed as well as self-sacrifice. The mere possession of a German name was enough to convict anyone of shining lights at night to guide the raiders, while the services of men like Prince Louis of Battenberg, who had been naturalised for half a century and personally gave the order ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dallas told me he would sometimes return to previous marginalia and argue with his former self. There are books from his childhood – the Harmsworth Encyclopedia, for example – in which the mythological and the real mingle so closely it is difficult to tell them apart. Sometimes visitors recognise a book they lent to him. They can thumb through ...”