“... even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment’). The writing of an ‘Ode to ...”

“... This is merely tiresome, it seems to me, as is the appearance of the wild entrepreneur John Self and the sober writer Martin Amis in Martin Amis’s Money. The real power of the thing is lost by sophisticated literary exploitation. A recent novel by C.J. Koch, The Doubleman, scores by showing a more simplistic and old-fashioned attitude. But ...”

“... world, even bored. Some are friends (two are lovers), most are allies, collaborators, members of a self-selecting elite or avant-garde; and yet there is very little interaction between them. None of the figures touches his neighbour; they may abut, overlap, hide behind one another, but there is no contact between them. It is almost as if they can’t wait for ...”

“... Literature (1910); ‘there is also something unbridled, a spirit which breaks all bounds of self-control and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the ...”

“... literary property whose manifestations range from memorable poignancies of anguished belonging, self-division and loss, to a vulgar stereotype of vaguely dyspeptic graciousness, all mint-julep and magnolia and nagging resentful memories of old gallantries downtrodden. From Warren at his best, as from Faulkner, and the Allen Tate of The Fathers, we expect ...”

“... a joke too far’. FE’s life was shamelessly, successfully and simultaneously devoted to self-advancement, self-advertisement, self-indulgence and self-destruction, and he achieved more distinction in each of these fields than most men achieve ...”

“... and a History of the English People, starts his third excursus into universal history with some self-interrogation. ‘Why have I written a history of the Jews?’ he asks, and offers four reasons. Three are variations on the theme of simple curiosity: nobody who had written a history of Christianity could help being curious about its progenitor, nobody who ...”

“... the students of today. He agrees with many people that students today are relativist, shallow, self-centred, unread, moved only by the wild uncivilised strains of pop music, and incapable of forming and appreciating deep and lasting attachments. Bloom’s criticism is unusual because it involves no hope that improving American universities will result in a ...”

“... Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He is a difficult character to get into perspective. Most Australians who might be in a ...”

“... of modern Britain and that of previous centuries lies in our apparently insatiable appetite for self-serving political memoirs. Until this century, the genre was decidedly unfashionable – much less so, for example, than in France. It would have been considered disreputable for any 17th or 18th-century English politician to leave the kind of memoir written ...”

“... a pretty unlikely proposition. Coming second is a more reasonable ambition, because only your own self can really be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and ...”

“... in particular; it is also that to bow our minds submissively to the actual requires a humility and self-effacement which the clamorous ego finds hard to stomach. It is an unglamorous business, distasteful to the fantasising, chronically self-deceiving human mind. Seeing things for what they are is, in the end, possible only ...”

“... headlong gallop into problems as complex and intractable as language, altruism, religion and human self-consciousness itself. The puzzling question about language, as Darwin observed, is why linguistic ability hasn’t evolved in other apes as well as humans. In both humans and other primates, there is a correlation between increasing group size and increasing ...”

“... it will not be possible to exonerate her from the ultimate charges of corruption and betrayal of self ... The genius is the only type of human whose agenda is pure enough for his [sic] motives to be incontrovertible. Lillie was not a genius.’ One of these women devoted her accidental gift of beauty to carving out a vivid, hectic and erratic life of her ...”

“... in power. We prefer oppositional politics; we would rather ‘speak truth to power’ (as we self-praisingly call it; am I the only person whom that phrase nauseates?) than exercise it. We are always against force; we are always quick to denounce a compromise, declare a sell-out, announce an apostasy. At the bottom of this there is, I think, the fact ...”