“... with a cheerful conflation of spiritualism and Buddhism: ‘I went home joyously. Any lingering self-pity from the past had gone. If fate, or karma, had meant things to be that way, then of course there was nothing for either of us to forgive.’ Antonia White and her daughters can be seen as three types of religiosity: hard, soft, and aesthetic. Chitty ...”

“... heavy with the burden of an essayed reference and lose the proper ludic frigidity of the truly self-referential work. But Dr Cave is elusive. At the very end of the book, in a weird and oddly touching sentence, he suggests that the real appeal of anagnorisis may lie in its power to satisfy our nostalgia for the particular, for piecemeal practical ...”

“... military power, not their strength. The connection between politics and economics seems to be self-evident and independent of the nature of economic systems. That the connection was operating in the process of Late Victorian imperialism is undeniable, but that process can be more sensibly ascribed to the economics, and power, of advanced industrialisation ...”

“... was irreversibly underway. On the one view, generous provision is not only irresponsible but self-defeating, since by distorting the market-clearing price of labour it perpetuates the very unemployment whose consequences it seeks to alleviate. But on the other, it helps to bring unemployment down by sustaining the purchasing power of the unemployed and ...”

“... Signal Company. The authors note a tendency for women, having achieved the right to wear a self-designed uniform, to individualise it according to fancy. Out of uniform, there were women mine-workers, mule-exercisers, sand-blasters, chimney-sweeps, and sorters of deloused garments from the trenches. Especially arresting is the picture of a top-hatted ...”

“... of voice.’ That gives the clue. The confident poetic voice takes things for granted, is never self-conscious about what it says, however unexpected or incomprehensible this may be. In a note on Betjeman’s ‘Myfanwy’ Amis says the poet has ‘got him where he wants’ with poems in this vein, ‘but I have never been able to work out quite where that ...”

“... it April the First. But who was the fool? Them for not checking me, or me for hiding myself in a self-destroying disguise? They wanted a photograph for the cover. They wanted a biographical note. All the time the worry persisted that it wasn’t the stories they were buying, it was Rahila Khan. I was by now beginning to work with an agent. She had approached ...”

“... life, or at least his circumstances, up to 1961 or thereabouts. It is not an intimate self-portrait: there is far more intimacy in the poems. Rounding the Horn includes The Guest from the Future(1995), The Anzac Sonata (1986), A Familiar Tree (1978) and generous selections from Hand in Hand (1974), Root and Branch (1969), Out of Bounds (1963) and ...”

“... open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish people’s right to self-determination, a right to be exercised separately in the two parts of the island. This was to be accompanied by an Irish statement of willingness to abandon the clauses of the Constitution interpreted as containing a claim on the territory of Northern ...”

“... also translates Native American stories). The Bird Artist was content to stay within this self-contained domain; The Museum Guard represents an attempt to break out – and is not entirely successful. From the fey, unreal atmosphere of Halifax we are suddenly transplanted to prewar Amsterdam. There is also an ill-advised change of narrator, with the ...”

“... come true, writing is now a normal thing and the public stuff performed more as a duty than for self-satisfaction. The woman stood in front of me and I prepared my face to receive her compliments on my writing with appropriate humility. ‘I just want to tell you that I really love your hair,’ she said. I ...”

“... his faith on the possibilities of a socially aware architecture and distrusted the maverick, self-regarding tendencies of architects with every bone in his body. Yet he was by no means unwilling to see promise when he met it, even in unlikely quarters. He admired architects working in a contemporary vernacular, such as the Norfolk practice, Tayler and ...”

“... to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom. A helpful ally, mother nature, and if she’s not too sure about the timing of the tempest, she can always be helped out. One ...”

“... were several editors, each responsible for the decade of their angry youth. Instead, we have a self-satisfied older gent, whose portrait of contemporary protest is worryingly superficial. The anthology omits most protests of any significance over the past decade or so, both in the UK and elsewhere. The world’s most important social movement, according to ...”

“... posterity most: the record of his life before 1939. His revelations about his middle-aged self and others in the studio penumbra were generally shrewd, unsurprising and circumspect. The first volume (1939-60), admirably edited by Kate Bucknell, was published in 1997. The second is imminent and the third is in hand. Five months after the first volume ...”