“... Under the circumstances, he told Edward Marsh, the poet’s literary executor, he had read Brooke’s war sonnets ‘with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure’. Eddie Marsh, too, was greatly struck by Rupert’s ‘radiant, youthful figure’, which he first saw in a student play in 1906: ‘After 11 years,’ he wrote, ‘the ...”

“... Viking era was nearly over. The section on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how ...”

“... in which print triumphs over scribal culture have been eclipsed by a recognition of their overlap; Peter Stallybrass’s work on ‘printing-for-manuscript’ shows how popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone ‘that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or ...”

“... not much has changed since Alison Smithson’s day. The chapter on Smithson, who with her husband, Peter, achieved a reputation out of all proportion to the number of buildings they put up, is one of Cooke’s best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... the new queen was attempting to draw together in a letter home asking Queen Mary if she has read Mein Kampf, ‘very soap-box, but very interesting’. When war came she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt with the combination of warmth, spontaneity and calculated effect she had now honed to precision. The letter emphasised Britain’s resilience while welcoming ...”

“... soil’. She describes how ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’ were read out, each as it was published, on the wartime BBC, and how that factored into their rhetoric. ‘“History is now and England”: that is the voice of a rousing speechmaker and it was meant to be.’ And there, in the buoyancy of Harris’s own speech ...”

“... Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to the duplicity was shock: ‘My relationship with my father was in ruins. I had ...”

“... came and went, the Branson book stayed, to be taken up by the decreasing remainder as a favourite read. Surely it must have been the devious, miscalculating and ultimately naive Nick who brought it into the house? Nick got sussed by the public and eventually his fellow inmates. Is the same thing going to happen to Richard Branson? He who lives by public ...”

“... all of Scholem’s scholarly apparatus, which has the advantage of making his book easier to read, but the disadvantage that we don’t know what the sources are for various elements in the story. In Scholem’s telling, the development of the great messianic movement within the Ottoman Empire took place without any influence from the broader Christian ...”

“... he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and jabbing their finger in your chest, for hours, but ...”

“... else insists so emphatically on what we are usually happy to forget: that, during the hours we read, our lives have gone quite still, and we are taking a stranger’s word for the world. A landscape, a face, a building, a painting, even a taste, an odour, an emotion: we will readily accept words for these, because we feel able to usher words into the space ...”

“... extensive list of unpublished documents consulted in German archives and published primary sources read in libraries in Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg and elsewhere. Over the eight years he took to research and write the book, Kurlander hoovered up everything even remotely connected with the topic. His argument unfolds logically and consistently. And there are ...”

“... Biographies​ of artists often read like legends of heroes. Vasari preferred his Renaissance masters to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art ...”