“... detail. There is much easy satire of literary biography, particularly of the stuffily myopic and self-important ‘Definitive Life’ variety. Jeffrey tells us everything: Edwin’s infant sounds are listed (for three months and six); so, too, his first movements, as recorded in his father’s My Story: A Baby Record; the numerous passages of verse and prose ...”

“... labour, between managerial and directly productive functions etc. Thus the degree of workers’ self-management would be a feature of the material relations of production. Within Cohen’s scheme these material relations of production are assigned to a kind of conceptual limbo. They are distinguished from the ‘relations of production’ proper, which are ...”

“... by Alec Guinness’s extraordinary face. Smiley is by now irretrievably lost in the realm of self-parody, and Le Carré’s efforts to invest him with heroic substance seem ever more wan and automatic. As before, we know just a handful of things about him: that he has an unfaithful wife, that he is obsessed with his opposite number in Moscow, the ...”

“... our desertion by the sour smudge on the horizon, from the erosion of labels, it is the value of self-definition. No one, not even the poet whose shadow halts above us alter dawn and before dark, will have our trust. We resist your patronage, your reflective leisure. The extra-historical landscapes he creates are didactic enough, but while they condemn ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... to go one better than the vieux riches, who always own everything anyway. Harpers & Queen, the self-appointed arbiter of these matters this side of the herring-pond, identifies the strivers peremptorily as Noovos, or Noovs. There is something a touch Yellowplush Papers about all this, but there you go. It would seem that The Official Foodie Handbook is an ...”

“... conventionalists to have felt that than the idealists.’ Forster’s reply included his standard self-deprecation – ‘one’s confused little mind is visited by impulses of beauty, whereas systematic thought can only come to the mind that is both strong and orderly’ – but it took up the point about the house: ‘The house certainly would not appeal so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their brothers-in-law ‘can only be explained by the modern neurosis which makes child-bearing a self-centred activity, relating principally to the narcissism of the individuals involved’. Extracts from Sex and Destiny were published recently in the press, which gives a cue for how the book may be used fruitfully. It collapses as a sustained argument, but ...”

“... do we make of the evidence? At first acquaintance, Gilbert’s work is painstakingly neutral and self-effacing. The facts, impeccably turned out, form ranks and march along in strict chronological tempo. The author does no more, apparently, than open a window from which we can see the procession go by. But this, of course, is passionate and committed ...”

“... and which he now, naturally, fears (‘Men who are going to die are apt to become garrulous with self-revelations’). It is an intimate, private story, which arises from the misfortunes of the daughter of some old friends. They, in their frustration and fear, have turned to their famous acquaintance for his assistance and he has responded with determined ...”