“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen ...”

“... species in the world and now critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic.) Personally, I’ll read pretty much any old rubbish about sharks and absolutely anything about shark attacks. We shark enthusiasts are usually caught between news reports, stupid websites (‘Aquarium Worker Bitten on Face by Shark!’) and the scientific stuff, which can be dry. I ...”

“... the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture ...”

“... Council. Anyone being groomed for the India Service and, indeed, for the Colonial Service had to read his works. From Lyall in India to Swettenham in Malaya, Shepstone in Natal, Cromer in Egypt, Lugard in Nigeria and Uganda, Harold MacMichael in Sudan and Donald Cameron in Tanganyika, colonial administrators throughout the empire absorbed his arguments ...”

“... italicised ‘No.’ Yet much as the professional amateurism of travel writing requires him to read up on his destinations without appearing too knowing about them, he keeps a wary eye on the assumptions and prejudices he represents himself as having. When a schoolgirl in Nanjing expresses pity for some chicks preserved in formaldehyde, he realises that ...”

“... was likely to spread. But it was too late to draw back easily; and in the end Prokofiev decided to read the situation in a positive light: Shostakovich might be a ‘formalist’, but he, evidently, was not; why else would the Soviets be wooing him? ‘In the months ahead,’ Morrison writes, ‘Prokofiev allowed himself to believe that, with Shostakovich ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... to bless or to damn a writer whose ‘inextinguishability’ will ensure that he continues to be read long after detractors and zealots alike have fallen silent. The organ which is the subject of this offbeat biography belonged in the first instance to Blair, even if its subsequent fame owes rather a lot to Orwell. Blair, it would appear, ‘was born with a ...”

“... It was, Swartz and his friends wrote, ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ to make scientists pay to read the work of their colleagues, and disgraceful that students at elite universities have access to knowledge while those in the developing world have nothing. ‘We need to take information,’ they wrote, ‘wherever it is stored, make our copies and share ...”

“... I assumed most of his fighting had taken place on the other side of the Atlantic. But now I read that the Bonhomme Richard had been involved in a sea battle off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and that it still lay somewhere near the white chalk cliffs. In recent decades, both the US and French navies have tried to locate it, but there are hundreds of ...”

“... the last laugh!’ Hence, too, the propagandist National Consultation in which the first question read: ‘George Soros wants to persuade Brussels to settle at least a million people from Africa and the Middle East in European Union territory, including Hungary. Do you support this part of the Soros plan?’ Orbán’s campaign against a Jewish billionaire ...”

“... is an authority on obscenity in Old Comedy – his book The Maculate Muse (1975) is a must-read in the field – and his versions include multiple instances of ‘pussy’ and ‘cock’; Poochigian mostly prefers ‘dick’ and ‘twat’. Though the Spartan Messenger in Lysistrata – whose dialect he translates into what he calls a ‘country twang ...”

“... the demand for embodied evil. I’m squeamish too, and I found parts of Murderland difficult to read. But the book’s impressively varied perspectives, which shift between geology, history, politics, literature and neurology, give these poisoned, poisonous figures an unexpected breadth of implication. It starts out as psychogeography (pun ...”

“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”