“... Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious ...”

“... stories, will be a match for him, but even she falls away in the face of his preening self-regard: ‘They didn’t know how lucky they were ... all the hairdressers he’d flirted with, all the travel agents, florists and girls in bars. When he was a famous, rich, literary-establishment figure living in Antibes or somewhere they would all realise ...”

“... which the new humanities men are so keen to discover unconscious traces in their predecessors. A self-made man of letters, Pritchett had none of the subsidies and privileges that post-war intellectuals came to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and Spanish masters for himself, and as a novelist and story ...”

“... compels the imagination is not likely to be our own: that past and place are founded, for our own self-preservation, on some variety of Larkin’s ‘forgotten boredom’. And only the best writers can deliberately reveal their own past as a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor ...”

“... Roberto Calasso is an Italian publisher who writes erudite works of non-fiction so elegantly self-indulgent they can be marketed as novels. He is working on a trilogy, or perhaps tetralogy, of which The Ruin of Kasch is the first part, and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which preceded it in English translation) the second ...”

“... Berie Carr is smart, awkward, and passionately attached to her friend, Sils Chaussée, whose self-assurance and sexually mature body inspire Berie with an ardour that makes subsequent attachments seem feeble. Growing up in Horsehearts, New York, a fictional town so remote as to make Albany seem ‘glamorous, forbidding’, the two girls romp ...”

“... fall asleep’. Much of Fima’s behaviour – his deliberate failure at things and his virtuoso self-awareness – makes strategic sense. He chooses to aim low so as to pre-empt the possibility of genuine failure, preferring the fantasy of achievement to putting himself on the line. He perfects the role of clown for fear of being judged seriously, and his ...”

“... not methodologically sound. Its prose glittered meretriciously. Even worse, it was entertaining. Self-evidently, it was bad history. Believing that they knew what constituted correct and appropriate history, they could only respond to what they saw as deviance dismissively, to innovations from abroad with insular suspicion. As academic history contracts in ...”

“... conflicts. Its very existence offered the promise of a world in which the short-term goals of self-interested states and leaders would be constrained by generally agreed rules and procedures, allowing the long-term common interests of peace and co-operation to prevail. This promise is fast disappearing. The US, the world’s sole superpower, now sees ...”

“... feel comfortable talking to adults and resents having to spell out things that are, apparently, self-evident to children. Whatever the reason, the result is an edgy, self-righteous book and a lacklustre piece of propaganda. Since Mr O’Carroll sees nothing wrong with paedophilia, he isn’t interested in our ...”

“... it. And, like the type of epigram which it seems this poet prefers, they resist the autonomy and self-enclosure of the brief, pithy kind in favour of a more open-ended quality and a visible sense of being part of the surrounding life. They become, in another word used in the title-poem, ‘annotations’. And this image from the scholar’s art is not, as in ...”

“... with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find their clearest expression in the intelligence community.’ In the course of my lengthy researches into the weirdly mixed social and political environment which led Anthony Blunt, among others, to play the traitor, I ...”

“... to be patronising? It explains why his own plays are artificial and ineffective, in that they seek self-consciously to separate out the plot, the jokes, the persons and the controlled release of meaning to ‘auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding’. The idea that some of us go to Shakespeare for one thing, some for another, is true only in the ...”

“... can we say of another claim: that ‘Joachim created the aggregate of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society to this day’? Or that ‘it is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism’? ‘Aggregate of symbols’, ‘vague and ...”

“... stiff upper lip than significance in it. Craig does not retreat into such manly taciturnity or self-effacing understatement: he asks himself hard questions and he attempts honestly to answer them. For example, his children climb, and he has encouraged them to do so. He recognises what he calls the ‘poignant paradox’: ‘we spend our best efforts ...”