“... to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the difference between leaking and briefing,’ he told a colleague. ‘Leaking is what you do, briefing is what I do.’ It is a definition which must appeal to his ...”

“... commonly shared. The Second World War was a more urban affair: fewer members of the officer (the self-consciously literary) class came from country homes; towns were fought for; cities were bombed. From Homer to Owen the poetry of battle had obeyed the unity of place, been centred in a field of encounter. The language evolved by the Great War poets, with its ...”

“... written four years before his death at the age of 33, is either a remarkably tough piece of self-mockery, or else suggests that his success in casting off the beliefs in which he was brought up was much less than he had once believed: Pox on it why do I speak of these poor things? I have blasphemed my God and libelld Kings; The readyest way to Hell ...”

“... to pretend to a modesty he doesn’t feel. Luria chooses to portray himself as aglow with self-satisfaction. Of a teacher who advised him not to go into research, he comments: ‘Perfectly true, but as useless as telling Gauguin not to paint.’ His colleagues ‘all tell me that I am a good [laboratory] director, sensitive but no pushover.’ ‘It ...”

“... the patriarchal family or dislocating existing social structures? Michael Howard, with that clean self-deprecating wit, the authentic méthode champenoise he applies to all his writings, admits, when speaking of his essay on ‘The Causes of Wars’, that ‘no one can describe the topic... as a neglected and understudied one.’ Clearly, in our current ...”

“... from the inner circle of ‘understanders’. If it does not exist, it has, like the poetic self, to be invented. A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream. A complete bibliography of the secondary material on Yeats would run to about seven and a half thousand items. A. Norman Jeffares’s Commentary is the best single antidote to the despair ...”

“... or a wheeler-dealer. (Though he did make one rather clumsy political gesture during his speech in self-consciously mentioning the Women’s Movement: he knows that women activists among his Far Left block of support are lukewarm about his record on feminist issues and wanted Jo Richardson to be their candidate instead.) He is also not a great thinker: his ...”

“... that Caroline Moorehead has settled for a soft-focus studio portrait of this complex, versatile, self-made man. She is, as she makes clear in the preface, the daughter of old friends. His lifetime – he was born in 1899 – has spanned twice-nightly variety shows in suburban theatres and worldwide networks of round-the-clock television, yet the scale of the ...”

“... women seems to have her own alley-way and her own little platoon of graves. They are vigorous and self-sufficient women who seem to have laid their own husbands in the earth long ago. After about an hour of futile wandering in search of Alyosha’s grave, we went up to one of the old women. We had a plot number and an alley number but, as is usually the case ...”

“... the one writer who is in the same class as C.V. Wedgwood, is not quite his usual epigrammatic self on this occasion. Although the book is always clear and often vigorous, I can’t help missing Wedgwood’s imaginative power, her ability to move the reader, her sense of ...”

“... an integrated landed élite was to be kept happy in its perks and preferably tied to the state by self-interest. So even without winter and Tchaikovsky, it would have been hard for Napoleon in 1812 to have conquered this sort of state machine. There was no strong Russian middle class to identify with him; the serfs had been instructed to regard him as ...”

“... Fifty years on, the witnesses they produced to support their case seem comically inadequate: a self-important windbag named Dr John F. Condon, who agreed to testify against Hauptmann only after the police had threatened to charge him with complicity in the kidnapping; a down-and-out hillbilly who was paid to say he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh ...”

“... a remotely comparable mental development. Where Harewood seems a born professional musician, self-bred as an amateur, the late John Culshaw was the born musical amateur, whose eventual breeding was to become ever more professional. In 1967, his last year as a gramophonist and the projected last of his unfinished memoirs, he was even appointed Head of the ...”

“... response to such criticism is implicit in his condemnation of much dissident rhetoric as ‘self-serving’ and in his dismissal of criticism as ‘within the existing scheme of government’. Opponents of the ‘great proprietors’, he argues, whether they were disgruntled politicians or angry and rioting members of the labouring poor, offered no ...”

“... For a village known for drunken brawls, it was a remarkable achievement of our collective self-discipline. He goes on to describe how the theatre was built and ‘a torrent of talents hitherto unsuspected even by the owners’ unleashed. Ngugi himself ‘had the role of messenger and a porter, running errands here and there. For myself I learnt a ...”