“... dignity. In his warmth and spontaneity the artist is a model of the natural, productive, self-fulfilling man. Feeling and thought are equally active in him and joined to a truly social nature. Through this freedom and full individuality he serves others, including a future mankind That is not the staple teaching of art history, but it is the belief ...”

“... work, pride and independence have – miraculously but inspiringly – survived among ordinary self-respecting people despite half a century of liberal condescension. The fact is that Margaret Roberts left Grantham a long time ago. A place at Somerville College, Oxford was the means of making good her escape in 1943. As a woman she could not join the Union ...”

“... to expose some of the imperatives which have driven policy in this important field of democratic self-government. He shows how, before the Second World War, it was the Conservatives who first championed the idea of a Greater London Council. They did so for the obvious reason that it would mobilise the suburban electorate in such a way as to wrest power away ...”

“... demi-monde’s chief bagman, Milne is able to state with complete forensic confidence thatIt is self-evident that the Libyan money, still in dollars in Lloyds Bank on 3 December and deposited into a sterling account on 4 December, cannot have been the money Windsor produced from his safe on 29 October, some five weeks earlier. It cannot have been the money ...”

“... of projection; the text is a screen on which the critic shows his own fears and desires. But the self-exposure in this unfinished essay seems wilful and extreme, as when Empson relates, in response to the fairy Mustardseed, that ‘I have not noticed mustard still biting while being evacuated, but I sometimes have the curry; and this of course makes it ...”

“... you don’t. Theirs is the grief or gladness your death brings. And there is the truth, abundantly self-evident, that seems, now that I think of it, the one most elusive to my old in-laws, to the parish priest, and to perfect strangers who are forever accosting me in barber-shops and in cocktail bars and at parent-teacher conferences, hell-bent or duty-bound ...”

“... century, it may take some uncomfortable decades before the book trade rediscovers the virtues of self-restraint and the internal strength to reimpose it. What follows in the short term? Bad things, but different bad things depending on which countries you look at. In Australia, which abolished its NBA twenty years ago, the consequences seem to have been ...”

“... Pincus’s picture of an animated political community is in one sense a reaction against the self-styled revisionism of recent decades, which has had more to say about consensus than about conflict, more about intrigue than about issues. His version, where beliefs and passions count for almost everything, makes it much easier to understand why men took ...”

“... for a kind of political writing that was (to use Craig’s own terms) modish, shrill, noisy and self-important. Eight of these essays are concerned with the contemporary careers of Craig’s chosen writers, whether public servants or members of the oppositional awkward squad. The odd ones out are reception studies, on Hölderlin and Heine. They are among ...”

“... a farewell letter to Bernier written shortly afterwards, she enjoined him to ‘refuse to accept self-doubt ... A human being cannot doubt himself when he is following his own path. If he doubts, if he lowers his head, it’s because an element foreign to strength, to his strength to be spontaneously is pulling him backward ... Why do human beings refuse to ...”

“... and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to call Oates’s walk into the snow ‘fruitless’ is to declare oneself a member of the postwar generation. Until the Fifties ...”

“... of natural living, in respect of their families, their food, their homes and their numbers, are self-defeating as well as abhorrent. The Youngs’ farm in Worcestershire does well enough, although they are in debt and have had to accept a subsidy for turning cereal fields to grass, against their wish and instinct to keep their farming as mixed as ...”

“... Haim Baram has pointed out, there would be no Hizballah shelling if Israel withdrew from its self-styled security zone – one-seventh of Lebanese territory – which in defiance of UN Resolutions it has illegally occupied since 1978. Israel is still causing immense destruction in the south. But life must go on – after all, the theatres in Paris ...”

“... that is true of all lotteries everywhere, including our own. Without superstition, without self-delusion, they are nothing. All the choices we make in relation to the Lottery – the decision to play each week, the amount we spend each week, the numbers we choose each week – are attempts to unravel fate, to find the key to a particular kind of ...”

“... By 1990, I was onto something new, and the world of before was a little behind me. I had all the self-absorption that was common, and I settled on a plan (in a very Eighties way, I guess) to make my way towards a point at some distance from my childhood. And for all the Eighties were in some ways terrible in my eyes, for all they looked like a decade that ...”