“... of the fatal shut-down has an inevitability about it which sometimes makes for less than gripping reading. In 1978, the Times Newspapers management set out to regain its lost managerial prerogatives. Jacobs gives us some idea of the extent to which the unions, or rather the chapels, had taken over. By 1978, Grays Inn Road housed ‘an extraordinary number of ...”

“... My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College, Nottingham, and one of my tasks as president of the student Zoological Society was to give votes of thanks to visiting speakers ...”

“... all political solutions since their power to influence political events was limited. Nor, on this reading, did such power reside elsewhere. The unions were frightened of the employers, the employers obsessed by union power, so that ‘what survived longest in the debris of Weimar corporatism was the image of the enemy.’ In a well-organised appraisal, James ...”

“... a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter Sinclair, a battered ‘historical materialist’ (aka Marxist) in his sixties, has retired from academic life to a fisherman’s bothie in Scotland where he is preparing a book to be called The Failure of the Avant-Garde, once revolutionary but now merely ...”

“... there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... caramel-municipal sheen found in so many offices – opposite four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained that due to the recent death of my father, and the heavy business related to the tidying up of his estate, I had fallen behind in the paying of my taxes. I was truly sorry to have found myself in this position but the last ...”

“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in ...”

“... No one reading James Davidson’s enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... she could handle me. It’s true that she thought I would be going away to boarding school, like Peter. So there would only be the holidays, during which, anyway, she gave up on work to accommodate Peter’s presence. I think she really felt that she could cope with anything, anyone difficult because she wrote about such ...”

“... war, the Holocaust and the tragedy of a young and pointless death was what I was supposed to be reading the diary for, but I was far too engaged with her inner story to pay much attention to the other stuff. Now, of course, reading it from the other end of the age telescope the story looks a little ambiguous. Quite a good ...”

“... both unlikely (a former Methodist seminary in New Jersey) and overdetermined (the University of Reading). But if post-colonialism and women’s studies are anything to go by, no academic discipline can really be said to have arrived until it receives the final mark of legitimacy: a Routledge Reader. At a time when library budget cuts have left the supply of ...”

“... work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how modern welfare has been packed piecemeal onto a site which once announced benevolence more symmetrically. The chapel of 1875 was demolished in 1974; the geriatric wards, psychiatric ...”

“... of poems in which the reader finds certain emotions being dissected, emotions she may feel while reading. ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ starts as a painful memory of his dad’s attempt to buy an expensive needle ‘for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable’, which made the salesman splutter at their pretension: ‘still smirking, he sent us from the ...”