“... climax two decades later. This, the author argues, saw the fullest development of town halls as self-consciously artistic creations, best exemplified in the romantic Classicism of Liverpool, the lavish extravagance of Leeds, and the Gothic splendours of Manchester. Then, at the close of the 19th century, there was another upsurge, partly because the ...”

“... so himself. But his embarrassment, pride and surprise at the fact (‘Me a poet!’ begins his ‘Self Justification’) are a dominant theme in the 50 sonnets that make up his collection, Continuous, which adds 33 new poems to the 17 that first appeared in ‘The School of Eloquence’ sequence of 1978. At their simplest level, that of narrative (for the ...”

“... simpler way of saying what Keller wishes to say. After all, a certain musical isolation (partly self-inflicted, like Beethoven’s) was an important aspect in the shaping of Stravinsky’s individuality, and it is not unreasonable that he should have fought shy of close involvement with such a man as Schoenberg except through the channel of an ...”

“... described above, was a South African; so, more importantly, was Harry Morris, the effective and self-important advocate who secured Broughton’s acquittal. All this helped to make the case quite as big an event in the South Africa of my childhood as it must have been back ‘home’ in Britain. I can just remember seeing the headlines and pictures in the ...”

“... essay in this collection is about the unique importance Conrad has come to have for him since his self-taught father, ‘picking his way through a cultural confusion of which he was perhaps hardly aware’, introduced him to ‘Conrad the late starter, holding out hope to those who didn’t seem to be starting at all’. Conrad’s value to me is that he is ...”

“... one in relation to their own. They can tut-tut over the cruelty, intellectual confusion and self-righteousness which attends the exposure of ‘traitors’ in America, while not noticing these qualities in a British setting. Perhaps in some part of our minds we suppose that America does not really exist, and that her journalists and novelists are making ...”

“... to transgress the order of nature by which like gives birth to like … ’ An elegant piece of self-deprecatory rhetoric, no doubt, but much more as well. For what Cervantes is doing here is to cast doubt on the very nature of poetic inspiration. In place of the vatic artist, in touch with a transcendental reality, there is only the human being, doing his ...”

“... there is something immensely attractive about Mr Sedgemore’s loathing for the sycophancy, self-importance and humbug of the Wilson and Callaghan courts, he is a much better diarist and autobiographer than political analyst. His book gives quite a good picture of what life was like in the Parliamentary Labour Party during the Wilson and Callaghan ...”

“... the concept of the cookery book as literary form – part recipes, part travel book, part self-revelation, part art object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination. Honey from a Weed is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few ...”

“... theme of Palais-Royal. A Church of England clergyman driven by the demons of both religious and self-doubt, he left his Gloucestershire parish and in time the Church itself, and settled in Paris. He was deeply moved by the liberal Abbé Lammenais’s failure to convert the Pope to ecumenism and to enrolling religion in the cause of revolutionary ...”

“... than ‘jokey’ means ‘jocund’. The slangy epithets, consciously vulgar and flippant, have self-disparagement built into them. In 1993 to call the airs of summer ‘sexy’ was a typically Auden-esque cheeky joke in passing; he can hardly be blamed for not foreseeing that sixty years later someone would be solemn about it. It goes along with ‘Vega ...”

“... though there is a mass of autobiographical material, the accounts are often contradictory and self-confessedly unreliable. On the other hand, the key to Simenon’s life, he contends, lies in the pattern formed by these contradictions and distortions of reality. In the main Marnham’s analysis is subtle, perceptive and ...”

“... my feeling is of having seen reason denied in favour of something which I suspect Garner’s best self would not want to subscribe to: flower power – the apotheosis of the hippy ...”

“... the Calvinist surgeon, who wants it for his collection. Claude is then taken under the wing of the self-styled Abbé, an eccentric nobleman who employs him in the manufacture of erotic watch-cases. Claude, however, seeks a wider scope for his dawning mechanical genius. Unaware that his mentor is not only a pornographer but a restless experimenter and builder ...”

“... good and evil. A large part of the cultural revival in Scots political writing has consisted of self-punishing examinations of the loss of specialness and excellence as a result of the encroachment of ‘metropolitan culture’. George Davie, in his Democratic Intellect, argued that Anglicisation had destroyed much that was of distinctive value in the Scots ...”