“... been killed, ‘but resorted to it only for raisons d’état or in what might laxly be called self-defence.’ Perhaps the argument itself is rather lax. Only psychopathic dictators ‘revel’ in killing; the others revel in power and, like Asad, are often prepared to kill a lot of people in order to keep it. The second point is that Mr Seale has not ...”

“... parents. But the longest and most distinguished story in Words of Love avoids both sourness and self-pity. ‘Spring Sonata’ records the life of Arthur Hallett, a 96-year-old violinist living alone on the coast of Suffolk. In this story Philip Norman enlarges upon the idea of music as a redemptive force in a soiled world. Hallett is ...”

“... relatively brief importance as a centre of big manufacture was ending, and when its democratic self-government had been abolished in a single monstrous stroke of political malevolence. Coupled with the traditional over-centralisation of British government, now suddenly accelerated by the Thatcher regime’s systematic destruction of local authority, it ...”

“... rapid reading’. Nor did he wish to be judged by this public. Therefore he set out to write a self-portrait, and he did so in dialogue form, a form which he had already used and which enabled him to escape from the tyranny of narrative. The Dialogues are therefore, in Foucault’s words, ‘Anti-Confessions’. The work consists of three dialogues between ...”

“... round the clock so far as I could see, a wonderful cheerfulness, equanimity and absence of self-pity. When I first met him on the Evening Standard, he usually walked around the office with a stick, making it seem like some intricate, elegant dance. Indeed, if I remember aright, he had taken the floor at his own wedding. But then, one day he was in a ...”

“... and his frequent journeys to Italy (often on a BBC commission). But in his last decade, drink and self-neglect (his staple diet was Complan) increasingly undermined his always fragile health. His notebooks record a continuing and courageous struggle. On 10 March 1985 he notes: ‘After the horrors and the reliefs of the last terrible weeks I have ...”

“... But two characters who scarcely get a look in throughout the Wharton volume, thanks to his self-effacing class-consciousness, are really the central characters of Mr Han-Davis’s wonderfully readable book. They are the proprietor, Michael Berry, and his extraordinary wife, Lady Pamela Berry. Mr Hart-Davis’s account of ‘Mister ...”

“... not involve a stripping rather than a toughening of the skin. Before the memory of her younger self – a girl she barely recognises now – vanishes altogether, she intends to peel away the accumulated layers ‘the way some people can peel an orange, in one exquisite unbroken spiral’. Yet if Audrey has been endowed with some special insight, she has ...”

“... wit of his novels and his letters, The thousands of letters he wrote, laced though they are with self-pity and dismay, quite often ring with the pleasure he seems to have taken in writing them. That is some relief, even in this dark ...”

“... on Hopkins’s background, and his life as a young man. His extremely able and in some degree self-made father built up a flourishing business as an average adjuster and marine insurance broker; the firm is still going. Eldest of a large brood, Hopkins seems to have mildly disliked his family and got on badly with his father. But he was privileged, had an ...”

“... things; but I do not believe that he was engaged in ‘analysis’ of the sitter’s ‘private self’, or that this would have been ‘expected’. The portrait painter often depicted his subject’s figure in action in invented circumstances as a way of suggesting precisely that familiarity which he himself did not enjoy. One of the most popular and ...”

“... sonata that recurs in A la Recherche. Striking about the musicians is their total absence of self-importance. They play a passage, listen to it back, then give each other notes, and run over sections again. George Fenton, who is co-ordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David Hunter, the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a ...”

“... letters home from a very bright pupil at a very philosophical school, perhaps – and not the self-congratulatory musings of late career. Certainly it does not torment him, as it did Nietzsche’s ripe sage, that ‘he cannot be the last thinker.’ The sense is present all the time that philosophy and other creative activities continue, that nothing will ...”

“... sons from war. Further to the west, Slovene and Croatian populations are being mobilised into self-defence units. Many young Slovenes and Croatians are dying – together with young army conscripts from all parts of the country. And all the time the supposed Yugoslav capital remains calm. The military may have taken charge of the country’s politics, but ...”

“... then, a confirmation of the modern theorist’s approach to poetry: that all texts are equal, self-referential, and that it is what the critic makes of them that really matters? I don’t believe it is. I share Davie’s rejection of that view, which presents itself as a revolt against the authority of the academic establishment but is in fact the ...”