“... 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 ...”

“... of Stalin, his fierce nationalism, in tones which are alternately aggrieved, suspicious and self-righteous. He is windy, vulgar and brutal. Yet within the rigid framework of 100 per cent Stalinism lurks a shrewd and lively observer who can quote hunks of Byron to visiting British Army officers during World War Two.The paradoxes are many, not least that ...”

“... soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife.’ It is worth itemising the outward causes of distress. There is poverty and the galling ...”

“... people treat each other socially as their physical height. To label it a myth, as generations of self-appointed iconoclasts have done, is to signal an intention to debunk it even before the first snickery little anecdote has been laid on the page. But it is not quite so ill-founded as the blatant hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by ...”

“... species, humans and ants among them, often act in ways which moral philosophers would describe as self-sacrificing or altruistic, abandoning limb or even life itself seemingly for the benefit of others; or even, in the case of humans, for less tangible causes such as class, faith or nation. The dilemma for what has become known as orthodox Darwinism is how to ...”

“... to the music of bands like the Replacements who sang tepidly defiant sagas of generational self-pity: ‘We’re getting no place/As fast as we can.’ Moody situates a gallery of burned-out kids in the toxic environment of northern New Jersey – the landscape the sociologist Donna Gaines has called a ‘teenage wasteland’. The ‘chromium ...”

“... unless Canetti was thinking – as I doubt whether he was – of the best-selling genre of self-help, personal growth books. I don’t mean to suggest that the Analects is guided by the aim of advising others on how to achieve therapeutic, romantic or financial success; but stylistically there is a strong similarity. That said, these chunks do add up ...”

“... that ‘inserted into the metaphorical anus of greater London, Jonson begins his life by eating self-consciously recycled excrement.’ As a subsequent upward mobility virtually turns his whole career into an ‘inverted figurative peristalsis’, it becomes difficult to resist the final ‘troping’ of both life and work as alimentary. In this ...”

“... rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her younger self; criticises the script and forgets her lines. Everyone is obscenely nice to her and she doesn’t care. Finally, she turns up on opening night paralytically drunk and goes bonkers on stage. Her moment of clarity arrives when she sees her arrogant ...”

“... keeps out of the way), her frequent references to her instruction in political economy (a self-serving doctrine) and her faith in the workings of Providence (‘I have always been guided for the best, hitherto,’ she says, ‘with an innocent and unintentional profanity’). This is a small world, with skewed priorities and proportions, and ...”

“... the most famous golf links in St Andrews, he ‘laid aside the obligation to be Borges, the public self to which his writings bound him’ and which he describes in his famous short fiction ‘Borges and I’. In another essay, ‘Digging up Scotland’, Reid again recalled Borges reciting Border Ballads and said he had been ‘much affected by being in ...”