“... His extensive quotations of financial accounts or from unedited reports of Mozart’s hairdresser read a little like free association in print, as though he finds it hard to shed the procedures that proved so invaluable in his great Haydn chronicles. Thus, a little apologetically, he reprints the complete catalogue of Mozart’s clothing as compiled after his ...”

“... a memoir of adolescence he has written.’ Swallow is a novel to be discussed by lecturers, not read for pleasure. To ginger up his non-story, D.M. Thomas introduces post-Chatterley musings (give them an inch and they’ll take an ell) which do indeed look like improvisations, straight from the stream of consciousness. Here is a Russian at the ...”

“... Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year will bring on ...”

“... which, I believed, were flown to Fakenham for me by aeroplane. My mother was teaching me to read, for I was her chief distraction from the war. When she wasn’t listening to the wireless or writing her daily letters to my father, she and I were playing alphabet cards – sounding out the letters and making words. Cat, mat, hat, sat, rat, fat. Pretty ...”

“... a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor before, and this book came as something of a revelation. As a writer he has the gift, which seems both wholly natural and yet to go with a very conscious discipline and decorum, of putting the reader calmly inside his world in his first few ...”

“... passage of the book he concludes that Freud, the son of a merchant from Moravia who went on to read medicine, and his followers, ‘could hardly help being Jewish, for their career plan in the Viennese context was a Jewish one’. The statistics, then, answer one question: how Jewish was the Viennese middle class? They do not, of course, answer the more ...”

“... why one might take up his scholarship or his fiction are not the same as those that make us read Mimesis or The Greeks and the Irrational – books that transformed, and continue to influence, our understanding of significant problems in European intellectual and cultural development. The worlds to which Tolkien’s writings take us are the old ...”

“... of six the children enjoy Beowulf and Greek myths. At eight they devour Dickens. By 12 they have read most of Shakespeare. Television is anathema to them; audio, video and disco just Latin verbs. ‘I hear, I see, I learn.’ It would make the ideal motto for the Anderson family. Painted by Moy (in Latin, of course) on a colourful escutcheon depicting three ...”

“... which he handled the medium – it seems to give a rather soft subject bite. It is interesting to read, though, in Lloyd Goodrich’s book on Hopper, that when they were first shown the general reaction from critics and public was that they were satire. ‘We were not,’ he writes, ‘used to seeing such commonplace, and to some of us ugly, material used in ...”

“... might share more than the accident of the way flesh hangs on bone is the fact that Dylan, too, read Rimbaud and Baudelaire and that Munch’s images, particularly his early ones, were contributions to the general end-of-the-century Symbolist inflorescence – in 1896 he even worked on illustrations for Les Fleurs du mal. In some of the pictures on show at ...”

“... the lower and upper shelves of dimly lit cases like the dusty bottles and books no one is going to read which clutter high places in theme pubs. The perfunctoriness of some of the labels here (where and when was the bird collected? What does the inscription say?) indicates that the history of the objects themselves is not quite the point.The character of the ...”

“... Times notice was headed ‘A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum’, and if the painters had read Guston’s 1970 notebook the betrayal would have seemed complete. In an entry made at the time of the exhibition he wrote: ‘American abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to ...”

“... of one of Bridget Riley’s prismatically divided, coloured abstracts. But these images do not read as flat surfaces; they are accounts of a three-dimensional world. The field is divided into shards and lozenges: the faceted forms of Cubist painting combine with the angled lines and rectangles of the Russian Suprematists. You identify, quite quickly, what ...”

“... to have made possible, almost accidentally, an art of pure painting. While Vermeer may have been read by his contemporaries as a moralist (what we think of as a sleeping woman was seen as a warning against drunkenness, while the woman with the scales may have been thought of as an admonition to live a balanced life), we turn to them – rightly or wrongly ...”

“... the desire to restore it seems both heroic and quixotic: an act justified only by perfect faith.I read Richard Goy’s Venetian Vernacular Architecture – mainly about traditional housing in the lagoon but a wonderful introduction to Venetian building in general – and lying in my hotel room, looking up at the high ceiling, I knew that the ...”