“... pages which are immediately followed by a full-length portrait of L. P. Hartley: diffident and self-deprecating, victimised by servants, a great weekender at country houses, the hero of a long vendetta with the swans of the Bradford Avon. W. H. Auden, in schoolmasterly vein, minutely regiments a marriage ceremony of the praiseworthy sort he had himself ...”

“... satisfy their curiosity: a sense of mystery pervades all her work. In the letters we discover her self-confessed longing for greatness – a yearning which could not be quelled, to the extent that she considered it her ‘demon’. We note a weakness for titles amounting to snobbery – her enjoyment of the aristocratic set and her pleasure at being addressed ...”

“... entertaining vitality. And this was evidently a game that many could play: black despair, entire self-deception, an inevitable violence waiting in the wings: but still, a stylish and entertaining evening at the theatre. It was what Brecht had noticed and raged against in the German theatre of the Twenties, and he would probabably not have been surprised to ...”

“... repulsive, ludicrous, and central, as if his author had conceived him in a caricaturing passion of self-dismay, finding a paradoxical relief in the process. If that were so, it would shed a further sad light on Toole’s despair that this comedy of release could find no route to anyone’s laughter. Publication was eventually secured by the unremitting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Gilbert Pinfold is the only one who loved the poor mad writer. Such matters are outside his self-appointed limits. Davis allows that Waugh knew most of the story when he started a novel, but finds that he only discovers his deeper purpose as he writes. Thus he speaks of ‘Waugh’s growing understanding of his major themes as well as his plot’ when ...”

“... is no conclusive evidence either way, never went to bed with anyone and who, like some puritan and self-punishing Odysseus binding himself to the mast, chose to make his chief subject-matter the nude male body – which he rendered sometimes piteous and always impressive but never beguiling. Honourably, Dr Liebert avoids reductionism, and he confesses that ...”

“... feature now of some collective nostalgia – is not confined to the Left Bank. The largest of the self-styled cafés littéraires used to be on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, where every customer who spent a certain amount of money was entitled to choose a book from among a long list of authors; and in the period covered by Mr Lottman, people might have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... much a figure of tragedy as Tolstoy’s wife. A recurring theme emerges from this biography. The self-sufficient Solzhenitsyn needs people, but he can easily discard them. For example, he accepted the Nobel Prize not merely as a personal honour but as a powerful political lever to be used with maximum effect even if it caused embarrassment to those who had ...”

“... thrill. At Elland Road fans chanted ‘Ripper 12 Police Nil.’ Lasses took up karate, Judo an self-defence, An jeered at lads in porn shops, An scrawled stuff in pub Gents, Like: ‘Ripper’s not a psychopath But every man in pants. All you blokes would kill like him Given half a chance. ‘Listen to your beer-talk – “Hammer”, “poke” and ...”

“... narrative, in which the adult forgoes the temptation to spell out what was unclear to his young self. Everything in the story seems merely contingent and circumstantial until the black convicts are introduced – when, like magnets, they gather every detail of the tale and point up its shape. Like the best fiction, everything in Time and Time Again is ...”

“... was a smug, snuff-coloured little prig. East Coast journalists used to take Mark Twain at his own self-performed value too, referring to him as ‘the wild humorist of the Pacific slope’. It’s as though the metropolitan finds it difficult to think of a man from the provinces – from further ‘west’ – as anything other than what he claims to be, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the international Communist movement in the Khrushchev period. Even allowing for the totally self-justifying character of Hoxha’s accounts of disputes with other leaders and his hostile, indeed paranoid portrayal of Soviet motives and actions, it is clear that Stalin’s successors saw little need to persuade anyone of the necessity of their policies ...”