“... bring it upstairs to my table, where I listen to BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one Saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate ...”

“... that survive from these two years were all ‘revisited before being abandoned’. Bacon must have read, but the only volume that can be named is W.B. Stanford’s Aeschylus in His Style: A Study in Language and Personality. There are no diaries, no letters, no memoirs, scant references to this period in interviews. And yet, within a year of leaving the ...”

“... none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing era’. And so, on 30 ...”

“... are those most burdened by meaning, and that a world which proffers total transparency – what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic ‘world of hyper-significant signs’ – actually yields nothing of the sort. Blue Velvet is the story of Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student played by MacLachlan, who discovers a seedy nether-city of sexual ...”

“... done’. But he couldn’t be bothered with The Ambassadors, and for his own part preferred to be read by the multitude who shared this view; and so did Wells. The differences between, say, The Golden Bowl and anything Wells would have wanted to write are clear enough. As Wells expressed it, ‘James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of ...”

“... ago he was with a specialist trying to save the sight in his left eye; at the moment he can’t read. Every morning and evening he is on a drip. He refers to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he ...”

“... sugar-dazed languor.It was a heroin Christmas because I was reading the greatest book I’ve ever read: the jazz musician Art Pepper’s 1979 autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper. It knocked my former top pick – Clarissa – right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just thinking about it. I realise there ...”

“... a more complex state of enchantment with the theatre. Early in The Tragic Muse, the young diplomat Peter Sherringham, not yet in love with the actress Miriam Rooth, notices that ‘the plastic quality of her person was the only definite sign of a vocation.’ Later, he sees that ‘she was always acting, that her existence was a series of parts assumed for the ...”

“... to social reality, and which could only ever be partial. Thus it is a mistake, Mitchell says, to read Freud as just another proponent of patriarchal morality, telling women they would be happy if only they submitted to the dulling pleasures of wifely and maternal duty. Indeed, Freud came increasingly to emphasise the impossibility of the ...”

“... windows. He had a cold and drank from a pint glass of amber liquid – juice or some remedy. I’d read that he’d spent time in Rhodesia and asked him about it. He worked in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a young soil scientist preventing earth on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white ...”

“... But the newspaper was only a few days old. I looked at the headline again to be certain I had read it correctly, then heard myself mutter: ‘Thank God.’ I called out to my sister that Hellman was dead. Lillian Hellman was good and dead. I clapped my dirty hands and made cracks about the pieties that were sure to be scattered about at her ...”

“... some are in agreement, but more are critical. I should not like to vouch, however, that Frege read any further than the Introduction; most of the derivations claimed by Sluga rest on misinterpretations by him of Lotze’s text. In the crucial case, however, both Lotze and Frege are distorted to make them appear similar. Lotze uses wirklich much as Frege ...”

“... in 1976. A French translation followed the following year,5 and an English one last year. I do not read Russian, and so I cannot compare the quality of the two translations. I can say, however, that the French is a much more readable book than the English. Zinoviev’s exuberant colloquialisms are much better rendered by his French translator, who has also, or ...”

“... and an opportunity which should keep it on the road for the lifetime of everyone likely to read this, and probably far beyond. The agents of the transformation will be, first, the Russian government and its as yet tentative entrepreneurs, and second, the Western businessmen now poking about in Moscow, fascinated, fearful and endlessly ...”

“... imagination. That’s how senior police officers, for example, refer to the IRA.) Republicans read Howard’s actions as being deliberately provocative; and it was not only Republicans who were disappointed. Breidge Gadd, Chief Probation Officer in the North of Ireland, recently attacked the Government for its handling of Irish prisoners in English ...”