“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... He had an iron bed and a broken-backed chair he kept his stack of old National Geographics on, to read when he couldn’t sleep. He turned the ceiling light off and on by a cord tied to the bed-frame. This whole arrangement seemed to me quite natural and proper for the man of the house, the father. He should sleep like a sentry with a coarse blanket for cover ...”

“... passing that invite further reflection. For example, we learn that the Medea was the most widely read of the plays of Euripides in the 18th century, and we may well wonder how a ‘feminist’ drama was interpreted or used in teaching. In the same period, politically radical students refused to powder their wigs, and the significance of this as a symbol of ...”

“... in love, and love felt very odd to me, like hearing the first few lines of a story I would never read to the end, because the end belonged to somebody else. Even I knew I was suffering from a crush and, besides, there was so much to love back then, in the easy, boyish way that I suspect most men wish would last for ever. At nine, I loved almost ...”

“... his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this absurdity. 4 April. Asked to read The Good Companions for a possible production I find I can only get as far as the end of Act I. It’s interesting, though, in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends ...”

“... McLaren and Johnny Rotten – who captured my imagination. What clinched it for me was a profile I read in Melody Maker in June 1979, the third part of ‘The Rise and Fall of Malcolm McLaren’. I’d missed the first two instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by ...”

“... of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ‘smashing’; George Kennan thought that he had never seen a better ...”

“... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...”

“... has no known connection with Argentina, but more than a quarter of a century later, whenever I read a piece in that combative vein, I still think of the beast from the pampas. Another image that has stayed with me came when I opened a book package, took out the review copy and handed it to Karl at his desk. The book, by a ‘French deepo’ called René ...”

“... to the apex of the huge new temple of Zeus at Olympia itself, the closest thing to a pagan St Peter’s: a gilded Victory stood on a shield, with an inscription, since rediscovered, commemorating the battle. The Athenians must have bristled at the fact that a monument of their military humiliation was on display for eternity in just about the most ...”

“... was Kasumigaseki, which is directly under the highest concentration of government offices – read Whitehall – so the targets could be thought of as the top junior people in the Japanese civil service on their way to work. Who is Murakami? An exceptionally successful Japanese novelist whose work figures prominently on the fiction shelves of every ...”

“... poetry-lover who can’t see beyond the Georgians, as when he recommends to those unable to read Sanskrit Paul Deussen’s 1897 translation into German of Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, where the ‘fable of the meaning of the Thunder’ can be found. His note, on the other hand, on Tiresias (the blind ancient Greek prophet who had been both man and ...”

“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”

“... up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s books to have been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul ...”

“... licensed emotional indulgence, they gave a total effect of slightly smug hysteria. Some of them read like reasoned reviews – of a life, not a book or a play: all, naturally, ‘raves’. It was almost an agony to open each one, and yet they were vaguely comforting, and comforting in their vagueness: at least they made some comment on my obsession, for ...”