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“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”

“... a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ...”

“... The full career of Jim Henson reveals that the gulf between the traditions of fairy tale and the self-inventing styles of television culture generally thought to have supplanted them is not as wide as the disparity between the two frogs would suggest. For a start, one played the other in a film called The Frog Prince (1971). Inextricably linked with ...”

“... or ‘inconsistency’ of his is a clue that the novel is one of those cute self-consuming artefacts. But this is unlikely. Homer sometimes nods. Wilson’s nods and becks and wreathed smiles are sometimes harder to take unseriously. In a sentence which is less exactly put than is his way, he has Severus Egg attend to ‘the stamp of his ...”

“... a minority has always spurned the past. The past intimidates, threatens and diminishes us. For Robert Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’, it was written on a ‘sullen page’. The past is regarded as a brake on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence ...”

“... are known as neighbours’; the unbearably pompous and long-winded Lord Chancellor Brougham; the self-pitying Lord Althorp; and Lord Durham, who, Pearce guesses, had ‘read his Shelley’, though in 1832 pretty well no one, let alone a Whig earl, had read Shelley. Pearce has something nice to say about most of the Tories, too, notably the nauseating and ...”

“... else happens, and then spring arrives. ‘In a typical poem,’ Ruefle writes of her work in ‘Self-Criticism’ (2016), ‘a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him. Something terribly dramatic happens, and the poem ends.’ This is fairly accurate, except that ...”

“... classes whose sequestered vita contemplativa could accommodate a more embracing care of the bodily self and whose self-presentation traditionally worked in elements of secular hypochondria or sacred asceticism. The tone became more hectoring; blanket prohibitions took the place of qualified advice; custom was generally ...”

“... In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection ...”

“... the name of its author), an apologia, a covert message to the Happy Few. The letters qualify the self-revelations of the Education and fill in its gaps. They don’t ‘tell all’ – that wasn’t Adams’s style – but they do trace the changes in his fortune and disposition, how he came to be ‘Henry Adams’. Some merely record encounters with ...”

“... those three lines from ‘Class’ in the first person, rather than that impersonal but also self-addressing ‘you’. ‘Tramontana at Lerici’, a poem from about the time of the Lubbock incident, begins in the second person. This ‘you’ with ‘might’ and ‘should’ in attendance allows speculations about the sort of experiences anyone could ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... is understood to include isolated acts of exhibitionism by a stranger, and sequels such as low self-esteem in adult life are accepted as caused by such events, it is not surprising, as the authors of Children’s Sexual Encounters with Adults point out, that an alarming picture of CSA can very readily be developed. The most serious omission from this book ...”

“... in Saigon) to include a sense of the wider world and its troubles in its hero’s search for self-knowledge. Burgess begins with a little metallurgy and quite a lot of history and mythology. A sword, Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the ...”

“... assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ Between Theroux’s democratic self-effacement and Greene’s isolation of the self lie the dangers of half-measure: shoring up your unease at occupying centre-stage with plenty of solid book-learning, or affecting a complacent high profile of ...”