“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... science back. The full involvement of patients themselves, in the practical task of recovering the self that has been damaged or lost, is the largest of these missing parts. To complete the progress that the Russians started, Sacks calls for ‘a neurology of the self, of identity’, a task of neurological completion which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Powell’s claims for the act of writing it. They are pitched with characteristic fervour and self-confidence: There are a few other men who know from their own experience as much about the film business as I do, but, as far as I know, most of them can’t, or won’t, put it down. It needs to be written ... I didn’t intend to write another ...”

“... habit of mind.) ... In order to hide, it was carefully explained, one had to have a concept of self. Not only that, one had to have the concept of self given by the ability to speak academic language, or at least a standard human language – a concept of self that depends on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Allen Tate, though, there were more pitfalls than plateaux. Tate was a quarrelsome type and deeply self-important; he had a taste for feuds, for laying down the law, for scolding friends who fell short of his elevated standards – both personal and literary. Many saw him as a somewhat comic figure, forever tinkering with the details of his Southern ancestry ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”