“... 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 ...”

“... is impressive, all the more because it’s clear that he’s naturally a reticent man who dislikes self-exposure. And inside the intelligentsia it may well be that these are no longer minority opinions. But in the population at large surely they are. Certainly in Ben Jonson’s England such a secular experimental attitude to ethics was virtually unknown. This ...”

“... circle, resembled a grimacing Magwitch by half-time. Paul Mariner, a picture of pampered, hammy self-love at club level, reminded me, as he trudged from the park, of the standard, traumatically chinless mod who puts in depressingly regular appearances at South Coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday weekends. Trevor Francis, usually the identikit ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... live in (if sometimes suspecting the right verb might be ‘wallow in’) this intensely feminine, self-concentrated, despairing world of the heart which has welled up from one super-sensitive unconscious: a world in which the only events that can possibly matter are those which affect a woman in her relationships of love. But there are other more robust ...”

“... tension in Racine (or Boileau) between loyalty and independence, the strategies of criticism or self-defence as well as the strategies of praise. Such an approach would free him from the danger of reductionism. There remains the criticism that the very notion of ‘strategy’, like those of ‘manipulation’ or ‘mystification’, is anachronistic. I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and that there are specifiable ‘occasions of guilt’ which account for the self-torments he went through. How much Byron himself wanted this to be the case his narrative poems reveal plainly enough: they reveal also just how much he wanted to believe, and wanted others to believe, that he was both the possessor of and possessed by a ...”

“... Poetry should be worked at every day and thought about constantly. I learnt that kind of creative self-discipline at Art School and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for. I feel uneasy as I write these things, though. I also remember all the talking I did there. How I became good at providing pat and horribly pseud statements about my ...”

“... when he was in his early twenties that showed signs of ‘callous insensitiveness’. He was a self-loather on principle; it did not reduce his sense of superiority. Ms Secrest says that her biography of Clark is not ‘authorised’, which means that he never gave her written permission to quote directly from his letters and diaries. If she had been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... policemen stand facing the red terror in raunchy rows, automatic rifles on one hip, expensive self-focusing Minoltas on the other. There was no violation to snap on the day I paid my visit. Just one bedraggled North Korean guard – Vera had been politically indifferent – to whom we were asked not to wave, or shake a fist, in case he should be able to ...”