“... it has peculiarities they lack. The least of these is that nothing in Larkin’s work suggests the self-seeking showmanship which many other excellent writers can on occasion rise to, or sink to. This pales before the simple fact that Larkin is not dead. The contributors therefore face a situation capable of testing the keenest friendship, and they do it ...”

“... the first. The South Bank Show was also reviewed in the Spectator by Richard Ingrams, as follows:[Robert] Redford was followed onto the show by young Martin Amis, a rather scruffy looking man without a tie. I was baffled as to why his new novel should be given about half an hour of publicity when there are so many other things worthy of attention ... Amis ...”

“... religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one. The tone was mild and tolerant, and although it was filled with uncertainty, there was a convincing veneer of pure certainty about the main matter, which is that churches ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”

“... a young woman, whom he finds quite attractive, that the local diet of bread and bean paste seems self-mortifying. She reproves his unbridled appetites, then startles him by asking how a wish ‘to grip me tight and push part of your body into me’ comports with admiration for the beautiful and the good.Simón’s ...”

“... silver in the age of Web 2.0, Thomson has since added, is open to doubt. But that doesn’t stop Robert Gottlieb from presenting himself, at the start of his new biography, as an unapologetic negative theologian. ‘She’s still hiding – no one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.’The story of Garbo’s ...”

“... this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be ...”

“... billboards and (by 1948) 137 million postage stamps. Since then it has proved useful not only to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... novels, among them a belief in the primacy of the conduct of the individual and the quest for self-knowledge over any group allegiance, a belief in elitism and a suspicion of democracy and equality. In The Mask of Apollo (1966), Axiothea, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to attend Plato’s academy, says: ‘Equality! I hope I need never sink so ...”

“... writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the ...”

“... provenance, his argument being that these had a range of application beyond their current, self-consciously technical uses The point was well made in chapters on Medieval and Renaissance literature. Structuralism might seem offensively newfangled to readers trained up on post-Renaissance notions of authorial presence and the unique, individual ...”

“... observes, not quite believing that he is putting right a wrong. The best of Defoe’s poetry was self-consciously rumbustious, and Jure Divino has some snappy couplets. Here are its opening lines: Nature has left this Tincture in the Blood, That all Men would be Tyrants if they cou’d: If they forbear their Neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of ...”

“... death comes in the last paragraphs of Brave New World. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in the Surrey countryside: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’Why did ...”

“... things, but contain them.’ And indeed, like her chosen idol, Cather made a fetish out of proud self-concealment. She never married, and despite the tremendous popular success of her work – she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours and had her picture on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 – she became reclusive and incommunicative in later years. She ...”