“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... familiar scenes. Among the professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of Birtwhistle, offers ...”

“... entire Nixon family, inherited and acquired, is characterised by nothing so much as sheer bloody self-protective obstinacy? My Nixon, right or wrong? And did it not permeate every moment of the final days in the Oval bunker? I leap forward a few years, and a few pages, to a Longford sentence calculated (though not by him) to make thy knotted and combined ...”

“... anti-erection, pro-lesbian – inventing yourself. The last chapter of the book, called ‘Self-Criticism’, is appropriately short. In it, White acknowledges only a ‘peculiar alternation between socialism and snobbism’ as a fault, which he tries to explain. I found this not at all annoying or even noticeable. The annoying thing about the book is ...”

“... is, of course, to reconcile formal diversity with a decorous aesthetic harmony, to create a self-sufficient whole. Appropriately enough, one of his paintings from this period, ‘Fifteen’, was selected by the Gobelins factory as the design for a rug. Kandinsky’s introspective patterns exclude the encroachment of a world outside themselves which ...”

“... background to this book. Over it all, hangs a question-mark about the behaviour of the Jews’ own self-appointed leaders. A heroic figure in the Jewish resistance, Ringelblum, who led the Poale Zion movement, and who made it his business to find out what was happening and to report it as widely as possible, said in despair as he witnessed the peaceful ...”

“... so enlightening or compassionate a book as it could be, and for two main reasons, both to do with self-imposed limitations. The first, which applies damagingly to most empirical social studies, is the limitation of investigations to working-class people, even when the situations studied are likely to be, in their cultural populations, universal ones. Whether ...”

“... going. ‘Diary’ is a misnomer for the trite intermittent jottings of a trite, intermittently self-satisfied bureaucrat, which really deal only with the period after the 1959 election. A civil servant to the last. Evans has remained far too discreet for far too long. So his account of articles and interviews long dead now looks as jaded as the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be more generous: he admits that they are not just ‘sophisticated erotica’, but ‘a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what the art of painting could achieve’, ‘a manifesto for the art of painting’. Had the author been less inhibited by his opposition to extravagant interpretations, he might have elaborated this crucial ...”

“... I say ‘almost’ because Derrida’s position always has to be guarded against the danger of self-refutation, the danger of discovering that in announcing the defeat of every previous philosophical position he is simply himself advancing one more philosophical position of the very type which he has attempted to disown. Against this possibility Derrida ...”