“... Throughout, the letters bear down on ‘Dear Allen’ with touching affection and bludgeoning self-regard. It’s as well, therefore, to read them as a tribute to their recipient, especially since the nature of the collection means that Ginsberg fails, unusually, to get a word in edgeways. Ginsberg was noisier and altogether more generous than ...”

“... fuss. The inquest produced a tidy, emollient version, which the coroner accepted. It had been self-defence, said the two witnesses, whose names were Skeres and Poley. Marlowe and Frizer had quarrelled over the bill, or reckoning. Marlowe had picked up Frizer’s dagger and slashed at him, Frizer had wrested it away (presumably while the witnesses stood as ...”

“... references as providing for Dostoevsky’s journalism a ‘penumbra’ that served as a sort of self-protection; one had to be very careful when arguing with a man who could adduce his own legendary exile and prison sentence for radicalism to buttress his arguments against it. Morson’s remark refers to the 1860s, but it is equally applicable to ...”

“... friends, showing them too clearly, one would have thought, what he expected from them, and his own self-absorption. Marie Nordlinger, a serious and scholarly girl who had given him a lot of help with Ruskin, is treated with a patronising gallantry which must have upset her. ‘I am all on fire for Sesame – and for you’ is not quite the right phrasing for ...”

“... each country. But today these centres have become victims of their own success: each has become a self-sustaining ghetto, too occupied with its own problems to communicate with other ghettos. The next stage in the history of the West is going to involve a massive incorporation of non-European culture, the abolition of the frontier between the exotic and the ...”

“... illustrations cunningly interspersed with the text. The style is quite simply unique, sometimes self-indulgent, unfailingly imaginative, usually irresistible. This is not so much a chronicle as an assemblage of brilliant set-pieces (the fall of the Bastille, the Tennis Court oath, the assassination of Marat) intermixed with little stories of some of the men ...”

“... parents, whether or not they were competent logicians, have been able to recognise a reductive, self-serving argument when they saw it. The logical mistake in arguments of this kind lies in the fact that breaking down a particular conceptual distinction between A and B is not the same thing as showing that there are no differences between them. The most ...”

“... the eldest child in the family. His father was ‘rowdy, quarrelsome, awkward, improvident, busy, self-assertive and too clever by half’, in Urry’s estimate. He appears often in the local records, sometimes in positions of minor responsibility – warden of the Shoemakers’ Company, sidesman at the parish church, constable at Westgate – but more often ...”

“... permit him actually to deny that there is necessity in nature. Similarly, Strawson argues, for the self and external objects: all we really know of them is contained in our ideas, which fall short of what we routinely take ourselves to know, and which fail to supply the basis for the kind of understanding claimed by certain rationalist philosophers of the ...”

“... or at least sexual satisfaction, but was unable to offer him the happiness a lesser man needs for self-realisation.’ It is difficult to escape the feeling that Constanze is punished, not only because she gave no sign of having worshipped her husband, but because she was the recipient of those late letters in which Mozart’s sexual and emotional needs are ...”

“... the sketches and have not yet reacted against that preference, which is rooted in a belief in self-expression, a love of the ambiguities that arise from an unfinished surface, a taste for spontaneity and a prejudice that cheerfulness is less interesting than a sombre darkness. But even as we go on judging the full-size sketch of Hadleigh Castle to be a ...”

“... induce him to disparage or neglect excellence in composition or performance. Yet a self-protective egotism was also, and necessarily, at work; he condemned what was not useful to him, and admired whatever he wanted or needed wherever he found it. There are more volumes to come – this first instalment ends with Grimes in 1945, the composer ...”

“... how much of an advantage my family’s love and emotional support gave me – a strength and self-confidence that many of my American classmates lacked.’ In best movie tradition, Gage’s dream of avenging his mother came true. James Stern’s mission, on the other hand, might have been conceived in a Hollywood scriptwriter’s brain. To discover the ...”

“... happy result of this might be that libel lawyers as a breed would lose some of the pomposity and self-regard which ooze from every page of this rambling, ill-written farrago of reminiscences drawn from cases in which Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients are paragons of virtue and dignity and his opponents are either left-wing troublemakers or irresponsible publishers ...”

“... Music Master, George (later Sir George) Dyson. ‘One hates talking (I know it’s only silly shy self-consciousness) about anything one really feels,’ he added, to explain why he hadn’t mentioned it before: ‘These things go much better into ink.’ Having won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, he removed himself to Schwerin, in ...”