“... her treatment of relationships. In the contemporary novel, sex is not often a cheerful, mutely self-sufficient act but rather a prelude to lots of difficult emotion, complicated misunderstandings and dark and brooding thoughts. In Gordimer’s novels, when sex arrives, and more particularly when men arrive, everything suddenly becomes simple (there may be ...”

“... and Africa, the two poles represented by his father and his mother. This was a typically inflated self-image. The reality is that like many Afrikaner families in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, the Van der Post household was torn between loyalty to the Volk and a powerful attraction to metropolitan British culture. Born in 1906, the 11th of 13 ...”

“... to stitch it together again. Marriage, friendship and publication had by now cured the desperate self-pity of some of the earlier verse. The matter is often light and delicate – lace, sea-spray and butterflies. Nevertheless, it is balanced by a recognition of darkness – partly the darkness of the war – and by the lingering pull of earthiness and the ...”

“... from climbing mountains would over-tax the Parliamentary draftsmen. Meanwhile England’s self-exiled pulmonaires were multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned Hotel, Discountenanced by God and ...”

“... framed and illuminated in medieval script, hanging balefully on the wall as an exhortation to self-improvement’ – though I’ve never seen one of these myself. Most people have at one time or another fallen under Kipling’s spell, if only in bastardised Boy Scout or Disney versions. I was bewitched by the Just So Stories as a child, and exhilarated ...”

“... the Jews he says: ‘Bear your share undauntedly in this work of redemption, gaining new birth by self-immolation; we shall then be one and undivided! But remember that there can only be release from the curse which rests upon you: the release of Ahasuerus – destruction.’ Even if one discounts the Jewish caricatures in his operas – Beckmesser in The ...”

“... in our midst. Peters is interested particularly in the expression of a Stoic sense of virtue and self-mastery in the free-speech position. The civil libertarian says: I am sufficiently in control of myself to look on the Nazis without contamination. I will not be brought down to their level. By staring at their swastikas and paying attention to their ...”

“... from the Discovery trip and then been lionised around the country, he became focused, but also self-important, pompous and petulant. Crane, always wanting to find in favour of Scott, admits to his ‘first real sense of disappointment’ in him. Perhaps he had found a sense of purpose at last – he speaks for the first time of polar exploration as ‘his ...”

“... be a mildly interesting piece of intellectual history. But it appeals to the manifold in the most self-denying of ways; and it requires no reference to competitiveness or to aggression or to the passion for prestige or to the need to survive in the marketplace. It may be added that critics of The Way and the Word are unlikely to cane it for ignoring the ...”

“... Underworld at War remind us on the jacket that ‘the Second World War produced numerous acts of self-sacrifice.’ (‘Innumerable’ might have been better than ‘numerous’.) The author doesn’t doubt that ‘a great majority of the nation had been brave, obedient, conscientious throughout the war.’ The East End of London, it is fair to assume, had ...”

“... His presence was real, part of the living tissue of our culture, our responses, our most intimate self-understanding. His destruction is therefore a radically violent act, not only against Him but against ourselves. And His corpse remains unburied; the stench of His putrefying culture still lingers in the nostrils – in, for example, the morality of ...”

“... a majority are MSM – men who have sex with men. So, although syphilis is a shadow of its former self, it has not gone away, just like another ‘old’ pathogen, tuberculosis, the decline of which has been reversed since HIV began turning off immune systems and drug-resistant mutants were encouraged by poorly administered therapy. Forgetting about ...”

“... realised version of The Trial, the melancholy Chimes at Midnight (1965), and several low-budget, self-reflexive documentaries. These movies constitute a substantial body of work in themselves, and a brief return to Hollywood in the late 1950s yielded Touch of Evil, a noir which looks better every year. McBride, the feisty author of biographies on two complex ...”

“... she becomes increasingly inaccessible and remote. At the same time, Changez’s treasured American self, especially after it experiences a contradictory and scandalous moment of happiness on witnessing the destruction of the Twin Towers on television in a hotel room in Manila, begins to crumble, as does his sense of his corporate mission: The following ...”

“... by putting in more hours than anyone else. He spent his life envious of the idle, effortless, self-delighting genius (or so he imagined Saul Bellow) and those with better educations and more refined childhoods. Growing up, he told the Paris Review, ‘there were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall. On Sundays I ...”