“... 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 ...”

“... at $1500 a month is ‘a real find’ even if you have to install the toilet and fixtures your-self. So for now Eleanor cooks, shops and cleans for Stash, walks his dog and deals with his moods; ‘sometimes I felt as if I were the sole member of the Bomb Squad: I had to defuse Stash.’ But it’s his apartment, and since the jewellery she makes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most fictional elements.What first appears to happen is this. In 1988, 28-year-old Saul Adler, a self-described minor historian of Eastern Europe, preparing for a research trip to East Berlin while grieving for his working-class communist father, is grazed by a car on Abbey Road. He is involved with a glamorous young art student called Jennifer Moreau, whom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exist, such as the unity of identity and non-identity, as well as some that do (love, poverty, self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has ...”

“... is useful to contextualise him. Stephen Calloway does this with deft authority in his essay ‘The Self-Fashioning of an Artist’. It’s in his milieu, the fluid fin-de-siècle of the 1890s, that Nicholson comes into focus as a personality and an artist. With Max Beerbohm, Edwin Lutyens (a close friend who was responsible for Nicholson’s trip to ...”

“... he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘Thatcher years’? The rich ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be typical of Fisher if his gesture towards a popular readership proved yet another route to self-effacement. Until he was about forty, Fisher lived almost continuously in Birmingham. The city was his imaginative centre: what Paterson had been to Williams and Gloucester, Mass. to Olson. Those American precedents would come to matter over the years, but ...”