“... servant. The names are a tease. Although a lord, Wimsey is intellectually astringent; Vane isn’t self-regarding, nor does she swivel in every passing wind. It is a lively, sometimes spiky novel, but the ideas are laid out on a plate and Wade is overdoing it when she calls it her ‘greatest’. How many of Sayers’s other fictions are merely ...”

“... to him that he should put on his mask. Ruefully, he did so. While I felt the glow that only self-satisfaction can bring, he will hate me for the rest of his days. During my time wandering from church to church, a friend gave me a book called From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne ...”

“... gender relations, and Blacklock’s ‘Tesseract’ section shows rather delicately the way his self-imposed disgrace created complex ripples among the membership. There was personal sympathy for Hinton and Mary, with a little left over for Maud, there was blame visited on the baleful influence and example of Hinton’s late father, but there was also ...”

“... that Rick will get into college. Josie’s father agrees to help Klara in a quixotic act of self-sacrificial environmental sabotage, though knowing his fascist leanings we may doubt his motives. But despite Klara’s faith, and despite her good works, the Sun doesn’t answer her prayers. Well, of course not, you think. But then there is a kind of ...”

“... and pleading, but in the end she left him and the children. Thus ended their decade of mutual self-discovery, travel and art-making as they flitted from Paris to Deià to Spain to Provence, foraging for chanterelles in Lans-en-Vercors, dining at La Coupole or Le Bar du Dôme with Giacometti and Beckett and Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Harry and ...”

“... from decisions made off the cuff and on the hoof.Characters step off the page: Marmaduke Rawdon, a self-made hippomaniac whose motto was ‘Win gold and wear gold’ (and whose family later made a fortune off the backs of slaves in Barbados); the tolerant chaplain Thomas Fuller, who looked like a butcher and was ‘the perfect walking library’; and John ...”

“... while Brexit and Trump were upending what dissent might look like. But this makes the books more self-reflective and ethically troubled – and the better for it.Battles of Conscience opens with a surprising statistic: that sixty thousand Britons refused conscription in the Second World War – three times the number who objected in the First. There is a ...”

“... To rescue every single work of antiquity from obscurity: the scale of the work was endless, self-obliterating. And yet ‘I have never yet produced a book with which I felt satisfied.’ It’s always hard to tell with the humanists – ornamental emotion is de rigueur – but I think this was true, or true enough. It’s not that Aldus was never ...”

“... been one of strong moral condemnation: to declare oneself a confirmed Delian today is hardly less self-defamatory than to admit to being an addict of cocaine or marihuana.’ Thanks to the sustained efforts of musicians such as Cooke, however, the tide has gradually turned. Delius may still be divisive, but his fans have grown in number. There is now a Delius ...”

“... I had come to embrace the feeling and had begun to think of it as my essential nature, my true self.’ He reminded me of Cal Trask, the Cain figure – the ‘wicked’ brother – at the heart of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.Banks would have been pleased by the comparison, citing Steinbeck, along with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, Nelson Algren ...”

“... reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing’). He wishes to enlarge the self, but nobody in the army ever did well out of wanting more selfhood – the idea is to submit yourself to the company. Royals calm themselves with a similar sense of mission. He wants to improve, but the question posed by his book is how he might honestly ...”

“... the sexual organs with a clasp’) was one such offering; another was the self-explanatory definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing ...”

“... university presidents. What’s urgently needed are academic leaders who, while willing to be self-critical, are better able to defend themselves against unfair ...”

“... her book to help change minds and increase empathy, encouraging ‘the work to educate one’s self and to listen with a humble heart, to understand another’s experience from their perspective’. Yet she tells stories of migration without revealing any empathy for the history of foreign black migrants or for the contemporary migrants from other parts of ...”

“... the transgressive power and chilly stylishness of all this (nor how close it often sails to self-parody). But it seems at least as much a ‘private vocabulary of symbols drawn … from the writer’s mind’ as it is a case of ‘analysing external fictions’. What isn’t immediately clear is whether those two ways of thinking about the novel can be ...”