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“... it could well have served as a collective title for the historiography of the post-war period. The self-confidence and sense of achievement which sustained this reformist vision disappeared during the Seventies. Rising crime rates suggested the ineffectiveness of police and prisons; critics of the treatment approach pointed to the invasive and discriminatory ...”

“... editors conclude, ‘the balance in the top 200 is an almost equal one between establishment and self-made money: 102 Old Rich play 98 New Rich.’ But it is well to remember that the Old Rich team, as one would expect, has a more stable composition, being recruited through heredity, historically consolidated, above all, in land. Just over a quarter of the ...”

“... irrelevant. It merely takes us back to the Nabokovian premise that fiction is not an exercise in self-disclosure, but in imagining yourself to be other than what you are. Moreover, is a Life necessary where the artist himself has left behind a masterpiece of autobiography? Anyone who has read Speak, Memory comes to Nabokov’s fiction with an absolutely ...”

“... private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are simply shut out, excluded by language. Feminist ...”

“... their strategies were demonstrably wrong and often absurd – and also, in the case of the GLC, self-serving. It went on to conclude that the Labour Party could never win an election under Mr Kinnock because he is ‘quite irretrievably’ just a ‘student union politician’. He is also ‘vacuous, verbose and comprehensively not up to it. The notion of ...”

“... the career, and to be unsanctimoniously unembarrassed about being serious – in short, he taught self-respect. With this he combined an approach that demanded that the text came first, and that the director and designer served it with clarity, lucidity, realism and grace. Lindsay Anderson cites the Periclean ideal as the model for Devine’s aesthetic: ‘We ...”

“... and sulky about the way things were as an adolescent raging against his pimples. The degree of self-absorption is remarkable. But while it is what made him such a good actor, it also accounts for some central vacuum which requires him to trash his talent, his world and anyone he comes into contact with. If you stare too long at the reflection of your own ...”

“... to overthrow. He may be tempted to reject the demand altogether. This reaction is naturally self-fuelling; the further one goes, the more irrelevant the demand may seem. However, the demand to get it right has great survival value. All the philosophers who have been found interesting for more than a very brief period of fashion have been driven by a ...”

“... his disastrous eight-year rule. Buchanan’s greed and guilt, his bloated and babyish egotism and self-pity, are surreally rendered: ill-at-ease in the land, insomniac, delusional, haunted by figures from history, by doubts which gnaw at him like mice (a nest of mice eventually colonise his intestines), he embodies the worst aspects of the national soul, the ...”

“... and terracotta. Barry Unsworth’s new novel is set in this DIY world inhabited by the suddenly self-made, the restless retired, the seekers of salvation in the soil – someone else’s soil, however, some corner of a foreign field. We’re in Umbria, in the sticks, not far from Perugia and not far from Lake Trasimene, where – hence the title ...”

“... in these forests and their neighbouring savannahs can still be sheltered from destruction, or even self-destruction, is pretty much an open question. Against this now customary pessimism, optimists, such as the authors of these books, argue that the long process of imperialist dispossession has begun to give way to another, contrary process and that Africa’s ...”

“... the gulf – the yawning, tragi-comic gulf – between authorial achievement and authorial self-ranking. The ‘little lives and little prefaces’ he was asked to provide for a new, multi-volume edition of ‘the English poets’ was sure to offer abundant scope for such a study; abundant freedom, also, since none of the poets under scrutiny was still ...”

“... someone guided by a crude ideology which made up for its total lack of intellectual substance by a self-affirming radicalism. His worldview was simplistic and devoid of coherence, let alone plausibility. He attributed all the evils of his time to the sinister operations of world Jewry and Bolshevism, which he saw as closely intertwined, and bent on destroying ...”

“... scepticism with a sense of becoming increasingly youthful as the years pass, he recalls: A self-ordained professor’s tongue Too serious to fool. Writing about Dylan, as against listening to him, is not easy and it’s useful to have Wilfrid Mellers’s ‘backdrop’ to Dylan, after his recent offerings, Twilight of the Gods, about the Beatles, Bach ...”

“... and doctrinaires to realise their high-sounding ends by their chosen means are likely to be self-defeating if not disastrous. But they are then confronted with the second advantage enjoyed by the Left – their ability to reiterate their long-proclaimed conviction that history is, in the end, on their side. Mistakes and setbacks there may have been, but ...”