“... offered to do his legal work for nothing. Eventually he became DiMaggio’s shadow and the self-styled ‘son he never had’, a designation that gets more meaningful when one reads about the decline of Joe Jr, the son DiMaggio did have, and rejected. Cramer is barely able to contain himself when he’s writing about Engelberg, regularly appending the ...”

“... allowing him to face the statue of the Commander with such courage, Molière seemed to exceed his self-imposed brief to attack the singers, not the song. What conviction drove him to fight a cause which endangered himself and imperilled his actors? Scott, concerned primarily with the emotional truth about Molière, shows much less curiosity about his beliefs ...”

“... Carter is shrewdly sceptical, and the use she makes of Rees or Straight, to say nothing of the self-serving memoirs of Blunt’s NKVD contact Yuri Modin and the grievance-twisted outpourings of Peter Wright, is exceedingly judicious. Indeed, the book can be read not only as a biography but as an exemplary account of the unreliability of interested ...”

“... fixated on the internalised hermeneutics of the academic industry, or conveying a cloying sense of self-congratulation for the author’s own ‘understanding’ of the master. The Years of Bloom evades this danger: the harbour of Trieste offers a new perspective on the life which, of all artist’s lives, seems in a real sense ...”

“... lives, helps them; and it is not for her or for any other outsider to suggest that they may be self-deceived, or ill-informed politically, or psychologically naive. She keeps to herself her scepticism when her interviewees themselves proudly invoke the tradition of an immemorial Russian stoicism to explain their own or others’ capacity to live through ...”

“... here as an ‘obsession’. Certainly, claims such as that made by the Vice-President of the self-styled Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, Kwame Afo – to the amount of $4.1 trillion – are unlikely to bear fruit, but it is hardly their scale that makes ‘reparation politically inconceivable’ or places it ‘in a political ...”

“... change decolonisation brought to the overcutting of forests or the commitment to unwise and often self-defeating hydrological projects. Whoever governed, short-sighted developmentalism ruled. This is a critical book but not a polemic. McNeill is fair-minded in trying wherever possible to quantify his arguments, and is willing to ask what would have happened ...”

“... for her.’ Discussions of this kind appear throughout the book, with an engaging lack of self-consciousness. Weldon also has an interest in recurring dreams, in premonitions, fate, tarot cards and the power of coincidence – themes that will be familiar to readers of her novels but which they might not have expected to figure so prominently in her ...”

“... hard times. The son asks his mother what she believes. She gives him a file the father kept of his self-justifications. ‘What did I think?’ she says in reply to his demand. ‘He weighed every sentence. They couldn’t have used a single word to lay a trap for him.’ The son breaks in: ‘He copied paragraphs directly from the penal code. He copied them ...”

“... The dwindling band of Keynesians in the Labour Party take the name not of Labour’s most self-consciously Keynesian Chancellor, but that of his successor, Hugh Gaitskell. Clarke makes clear just what an odd fish Cripps must have seemed: That [by 1939] he should have become a left-wing socialist was a paradox. That he should have become a teetotaller ...”

“... the fragments that she quotes, this is not my feeling. There is in them, sometimes, a ‘wise’, self-admiring pseudo-frankness which makes one want to tear one’s hair. What is significant, too, is that from early days they decided to have the letters typed up – evidently with an eye to some future audience. Antonio eventually discovered the affair and ...”

“... of Nations so unimportant? In the first number of the Edinburgh Review, launched in 1755 in a self-conscious attempt to press Edinburgh writers on the world, Alexander Wedderburn (later lord chancellor) listed two obstacles that held up Scottish literary improvement: a lack of both a ‘standard of language’ and a tradition of good printing. As it ...”

“... of treason there fashioned Was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth – which, self-evidently, won’t do. O’Donoghue then quotes Marie Borroff’s translation: The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit Was impeached for his perfidy, proven most true This is better, making more sense of the last phrase, and also, like ...”

“... own autobiography, Passages in a Wandering Life, but there is far more feverish guilt and self-contradiction in his life than the term ‘wandering’ suggests. The narrative of this life is in no sense straightforward. It has lost that classic linear imperative that characterised the religious quest of Pilgrim’s Progress. What Matthew Arnold ...”

“... penny had dropped. I might have mentioned Freud or Melanie Klein. Or the terrible isolation of the self-aware individual and the horror of the certainty of absolute extinction. Or false consciousness. But I said: ‘Oh.’ I said it as weakly as I could, trying not to imply either that her reasoning had cleared the mists in my mind to revelation, or that I was ...”