“... from time to time the presence of frustrated, unavowed energies and a consequent posturing and self-deception. He was, by all accounts, an aggressive man, even something of a bully, and like many such people he enjoyed exaggerating his own hard-headedness: according to Berlin, he would, devastatingly, ask candidates for a lectureship in English at the ...”

“... ending, where the themes of the novel seem to be left to drift, and the narrator obtrudes a bit self-consciously by bringing things to an end at the moment of his birth. What I most admire in the novel are particular insights and particular conjunctions. ‘And so I am jealous of every detail in any of those carriages in which she sat, all the more so since ...”

“... tutorials: on the passage to India. Carpenter went to the East in 1890, to peel off his outer self, and effectively ended his English political career. He came back to the world of anti-vivisection, of the Fellowship of the New Life, and to the rise of the Uranians. Employing sexual typologies from German sources, and also using a Lamarckian notion of ...”

“... The destruction of the Times by the unions is no aberration, not a case-study in unenlightened self-interest, not at all: the NGA behaved perfectly rationally in putting its craft future above the survival of the Times; the chapels behaved equally rationally in clinging to their power and upholding their highly lucrative restrictive practices. The casual ...”

“... of which astronomy is a very good example, justifies itself to its paymasters in essentially self-imposed terms. Technical spin-offs are mentioned, but the pursuit of pure knowledge is obviously an activity worth supporting, and comets certainly do not figure large on a map increasingly dominated by the visually unexciting but theoretically compelling ...”

“... deal of interest in the techniques of Modernism and theories that would see a work of fiction as a self-contained system of signs, it is curious that they should have settled so contentedly for the traditional chronicle. But so it is: for better or worse the world is still there, even if the French refuse to speak to it, and it is harder to escape from than ...”

“... talk about Kafka, the man and the work, without falling either into the Brod-Muir trap or into the self-destructiveness of the Heller approach. There was a whole world waiting to be explored, and one which could be explored with humanity and patience: the world of his relations with people, with his background, with his art. A new, much more varied Kafka was ...”

“... the closest links with the Trade Union movement. This party, a rump of its former Parliamentary self, would recognise that the prospect of achieving its ends through Parliamentary means was virtually non-existent. It would be driven to attempt to organise acts of political irresponsibility and to seek to use its traditional ties with the Trade Union ...”

“... of Eleanor Farjeon’s Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years there is actually little danger, for her self-effacing tone, though pointedly, is not disruptively so; her story, especially towards the end, becomes a vehicle for Thomas’s letters, and it is in fact from these that Motion quotes. Helen Thomas’s books – As it was, World without End and Time and ...”

“... Distinctly impressive, however, are the brisk, dispassionate responses to people met, untouched by self-regard, and the sharp observation of the contents of the palace of the Maharajah of Benares and, in particular, the McNab-like accounts, neither squeamish nor morbid, of the burning of corpses on the ghats: ‘The outside bits tended to burn least ...”

“... the folly of publishers who send out such ropey review copies, the whole business is commercially self-defeating because Redfern’s panoramas are clearly intended to be the prime selling point of the publication (or does the Sagan introduction signal a failure of nerve up at ‘command level’ somewhere?). Much of the rest of both text and illustrations can ...”

“... housewife was at that period, a seeming capitalist but without capital. I suspect it was his own self-employed homeworker status that misled Shaw into thinking that copyright was a species of property in economic reality as well as by legal fiction, and into supposing that artistic creators are to be analysed as capitalists, collecting royalties on their ...”

“... as a not especially welcome guest of King Henry in London; her life story is as full of spirited self-assertion and dubious decisions as that of Queen Margaret.Any follower of the narrative that unfolded after Margaret’s return to Scotland in 1517 is likely to become dizzy with the diplomacy and political alliances into which she was now plunged. They ...”

“... eventually, and provides a succinct explanation, but only after what seems an absurd display of self-doubt and overthinking. The repetition and rethinking are consequences of the training process developed by DeepSeek and give the model high scores on problem-solving benchmarks. But there is still something unsettling about it: if a student or colleague ...”

“... much younger and more vulnerable now that he’s no longer the narrator-hero – and reveals a self-interested reason for trying to keep him alive for the rest of the book: ‘Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away. Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?’ In Twain’s novel, Huck and Jim separate when their raft is hit by ...”