“... and Anaïs Nin, who did each other good but – fortunately, no doubt, for them – were much too self-absorbed to ascribe dominance to someone else. One cannot imagine either saying: ‘The one who dictates inside is you.’ More temperately, Nin wrote to Miller that ‘you gave me reality and I gave you introspection, but we have to keep ourselves balanced ...”

“... great old ghost as I read his letters or looked through his photographs. He explored his private self in his fiction rather than his letters. He was careful how he used his time. The files and Greene’s library will be sold by private treaty, and the money will go to help Elisabeth Dennys, Greene’s sister, who dealt with his correspondence for so many ...”

“... The chapter on Edith Sitwell is wonderfully funny. A luncheon at her club when this tremendously self-important poetess, temporarily disconcerted by a bluebottle caught in the Venetian blinds, affected a swoon until the insect was dispatched is worthy of Lytton Strachey; as is the ceremony of her being received into the Catholic Church. A long telegram ...”

“... the curse off the diary as ‘public confession’. His hatreds are, besides, usually softened by self-condemnation, as when in 1943 he says: ‘I hate Jews, English, Roosevelt, life, myself.’ Inman’s social and political rantings tell us very little of consequence about the period, and the value of the diary as social history lies elsewhere. They tell us ...”

“... the task of the historian, and of the role in which he had cast himself. Some are unconvincingly self-deprecating, as when he speaks of ‘a more exalted pen than mine’: though ‘suited perhaps to the trifling province of catching ridicules’, his was ‘unequal to the lofty compass of history’. In the same spirit, he writes: ‘I am no historian: I ...”

“... given by real-life liars or dupes. The ‘coming clean’ is perhaps represented by Fowles’s self-confident expressions of his own opinions: indeed, he ends the novel with an epilogue, making his position clear on the religious and political issues which his story illustrates. He writes to the duke that he suspects that the actor, Lacy, is trying to tell ...”

“... you are not open with other people, you are not open with yourself.’ He views his infant self from afar, with twee delight, but somehow without curiosity. What mattered deeply to him and what mattered scarcely at all are presented in a richly jewelled jumble, so indulgently detailed as to give the reader visual indigestion. The smooth, elegant style ...”

“... were no more ready to abandon vortex models, which continued to proliferate in glorious and self-defeating complexity. It is valuable for a scientist to learn, from studies such as this collection, how hard a struggle a radically new idea has to endure before it triumphs. Max Planck expressed it in a celebrated sentence: ‘A new scientific truth does ...”

“... hardships of home. Perhaps this is the novel’s bleakest moment: it is also one of affirmative self-discovery which unites Leila with the heroines of Paule Marshall’s novels. Selina Boyce in Brown Girl, Brownstones leaves Brooklyn for Barbados, where her father had inherited a plot of land. And Avey Johnson in Praisesong for the Widow digs deep into her ...”

“... of the Far Right. Discovery of the past, especially one’s own, is part of the process of self-emancipation – as more than one Fin-de-Siècle Viennese would have been ready to point ...”

“... than anyone else, and neither can he have relished public debate on the messy business of possible self-interest in priests. Yet, as he says, it is no very comfortable matter for an Irish Protestant to criticise any instance of priestly greed, even if it should exist, when the countryside has so many half-empty rectories, deaneries and episcopal ...”

“... easy to know ‘where power lay and what the prospects were’. The fatuity of the assertion is self-evident. Here we have two serious analysts, working with considerably more information than was available under previous Soviet leaders, and they cannot really tell us if Mikhail Gorbachev will make much difference to anything. They are both agreed that ...”

“... a subtle ear. If Housman had been able to effect a junction between his poetic and his critical self, if like the mutinous Ned in one of his finest poems – how characteristic that when he submitted Last Poems to J.W. Mackail for criticism, ‘Hell Gate’ should have been the one he had most doubts about! – he had found the courage to shoot the ...”

“... First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within the terms of the old, 19th-century polity. In contrast to those of Germany, Italy and France, however, it was overcome; and it was overcome by buying the working class off. The forms of the ...”

“... Trinidad, he records, that helped him become a writer, by sending him to England: but it was self-governing Trinidad that sent him on ‘a colonial tour in 1960 – and by this accident I became a traveller.’ Much of his fiction and travel writing reflects a strong interest in the question of where he – and people in like case, colonials or ...”