“... enforce the sense of loss. It might be a conventional protest-poem were it not for its bleak and self-accusing conclusion: I’m afraid, reading this passage now, That everything I knew has been destroyed By those whom I admired but never knew; The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat And I’m afraid most of my friends are dead. Three other poems here ...”

“... Southampton, this sort of political intrigue is described as one might report today on a group of self-interested businessmen seeking to further their own fortunes by a little shady dealing. There is no hint of the tribal passions, near-paranoia and volatile emotions that would once have made 15th-century politics seem sometimes closer to the court life of ...”

“... Cage wrote and published between 1973 and 1978, and it makes dismal reading. Fey, rambling, un-self-critical, Cage betrays the weakness that afflicts so many who set themselves up as father-figures – the habit of gurulity. As it happens, very little of this book is concerned with music, but what is is stunningly banal. There is a two-page reminiscence ...”

“... to numerous funds and foundations for moneys received, but Raleigh Trevelyan appears to have been self-financing and to have mingled occasional privations with his pleasures (but drawing the line at the unalluring Hotel Decent in Peshawar). He suffered the predictable shocks and importunities of travel, like all those requests for copies of Playboy, along ...”

“... enough – to celebrate Cobden’s rejection of armed intervention whatever the cause, his self-chosen role as an international man. But it was as a Manchester man that Cobden came to be most generally regarded. Before and after the Second World War, a succession of books presented him as a spokesman for the industrial North, as a prime exemplar of ...”

“... air of defeatism in Macaulay’s person as well as in her work, about which she was consistently self-deprecating: ‘I have no wish to be a great writer. My touch is for trivial topicalities,’ she wrote to her mother. Macaulay was a dowdy woman, and before the age of thirty was well on the way to being a batty spinster in the great English tradition. She ...”

“... Tully attends a meeting where a young leader, Paul, tries to infuse a sense of dignity and self-esteem among his community: Paul ‘asked the young men to stand up one by one and say who they were. One said “a Harijan”. Another: “A scheduled caste – that is, I come from a depressed community.” And one even said: “I am an ...”

“... then, the Hillary wars will simply express a new American symptom, a projection of parts of the self that American women love to ...”

“... legislation and what will become of us all.’Wodehouse was here being, among other things, self-satirising. He was, all through his life, absolutely obsessed with money and with the necessity of preserving it from the clutches of the Revenue. This theme permeates his letters and took up much of his time with agents, lawyers and accountants; long ...”

“... process than all the political sleaze about which Labour has recently been so confidently self-righteous. What Labour in government will need is some positive agenda which is distinctively its own, to go with the Howard-speak that will be a necessary evil in the early days of a future government. Roy Jenkins had race and sex discrimination to ...”

“... apparently lifeless corpse. All in all, any provident narratologist will regret the loss of this self-de-authenticating multiplex of designer figments. Winkler and Stephens have assembled a posy of broken blossoms – a standard reference and a book attractive to the amateur of sentiment and sensation. In an edition which enlivens unpedantic scholarship with ...”

“... which he never could be, for God and nature had been against him’. In other words, he was a self-advertising showman. However deep his Radicalism, it lacked both the historical depth of Catharine Macaulay’s and the authority of the natural rights theories that attracted Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. One is left with the feeling that Wilkes ...”

“... image of puzzled, hurt, battle-weary masculinity, the riders could easily have been ludicrous and self-pitying had Winton not proved himself capable, by this stage, of negotiating with such assurance between the physical and spiritual planes of his narrative. As it is, the image takes on a hard-won grandeur which reflects back on the book as a whole. For all ...”

“... Place is emblematic. Silver-town is not its downriver self, the boarded-up ribbon of dust between the City Airport and the Tate – Lyle sugar factory, but ‘a silent quay ... a bale of cinnamon ... in the night air’. ‘An Aquarian moon rises over Limehouse.’ The psychogeography of London is affected by the ...”

“... no sense, for study and writing had been his path to fame – he was, in fact, a classic case of self-advancement through authorship. As against Kates, I would imagine that d’Eon must have had at least a mild sexual interest in cross-dressing. How else explain a very charming portrait of him in female dress done when he was 25? One takes to d’Eon. Kates ...”