“... by some intrusive editorialising (‘I insist I have not made this up’). There is some of the self-regarding tricksiness of Midnight’s Children, though there is more of the mainstream American novel in Rushdie than one could see there. Like Tristram Shandy, the work begins ab ovo, or ab semine, and Rushdie can’t resist some glances back: ‘There are ...”

“... that Wilson somewhat neglected his journal. There is now only a little of the characteristic self-absorption of the true journal-keeper, to whom nothing human is alien as long as he has a part in it – and to whom his own absurdities are as worthy of record as anything else: – Blond woman violinist with Portia-like yellow hair – Ruth Posselt ...”

“... cleanse off blood pollution – a practice which at least one famous Greek philosopher regarded as self-contradictory. Even in the fourth century Macedonian armies were purified by marching between the two halves of a dog, whose severed body was thought to have created an absorptive zone. The Greeks preserved a strict sense of the sanctity of place, holding ...”

“... popularised a form of indebtedness which carries no stigma. Indeed so firmly have we accepted our self-image as a society of debtors that any increase in current interest rates is regularly greeted by the media as inherently deplorable, and one may look in vain for even a bare mention of the consequential increases payable to depositors in building societies ...”

“... was also his father. He decides to strike up an acquaintance with her, at first out of vague self-interest: but it soon develops into a genuine emotional tie, which also includes Denny, Gerald’s friend and partner, who becomes obsessed with the girl, and she with him, in a more uncomplicated fashion. Neither of the men knows how much the other sees of ...”

“... of a popular success, and it also rescues Thomas’s writing from sprawling psychoanalytical self-indulgence. Perhaps it is with justice that Pushkin’s elegant strength is sometimes compared with Mozart’s. Certainly the effect of moving as a reader from The White Hotel to Ararat recalls a process familiar in the history of musical ...”

“... his review of Undine that Weber formulated his idea of opera as ‘the German ideal – namely, a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve, to form a new world’. This earliest view of a Gesamtkunstwerk was to be seized upon by Wagner, whose own musical ...”

“... And it would all be fun – our own English brand of magic realism – if it were neatly self-sufficient and the pattern of reversals quite harmonious. But not so. Far from being merely playful, The Philosopher’s Pupil reaches out after meaning, and undertakes to deal with such issues as evil, innocence and salvation. So it borrows suggestively ...”

“... that the key assumption underlying the monetarist approach is that a market economy is inherently self-stabilising. No evidence is given for this. Indeed, how could it be? What evidence exists would surely suggest that market economies have never been stable, and that even less have they been stable at levels of economic activity, employment and income of ...”

“... The last eight chapters contain speculations about the future. They include a vision of self-reproducing automata, which may alter the appearance of deserts, and ultimately perhaps of the solar system. He points out that the nature of such developments is critically dependent on time-scale, on whether a generation of these automata is comparable to ...”

“... The Strange Museum marks, as they say, an interesting development. The poems here are less self-contained, more resonant and suggestive, than those earlier ones. Paulin, moreover, now speaks with a distinct personal voice and, like Muldoon, though more sombrely, can lead the mind into strange corners, many of them unswept for years – as in the title ...”

“... reaper) is indeterminate, ‘a blob of white and two thin lines’: the solitude and the self-sufficient materialisation in paint are what give to this largely objective landscape its imaginative ...”

“... phrase go be soaked in salt’). The vigorous demotic of the writing unifies the poem: sense of self and its denial, history and its absence, landscape and the language that must bring it all to life. The long title poem expresses similar preoccupations, with great bitterness and power, but the third major poem in this collection is in a very different ...”

“... everything else and wait for someone to give him money. It may look like gambling, lies, and self-destruction tomorrow. But once upon a time, the Korda boys had been ambitious and only modestly provided for in the plains of rural Hungary. Alex’s world was disintegrating already in 1947. The government was trying to help him save the film industry, but ...”

“... and office and accept the rage and obloquy that followed, was an honourable way to escape from the self-woven web of deception, and to release others who had become entangled in it. Since then, Profumo has made full amends through charitable works, now rightly rewarded by formal recognition. Lord Denning, too, did no more and no less than anyone who knew him ...”