“... out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been ...”

“... decade. At the very mention of their hero’s name, the pinstripes on the government benches rose like a lot of Pavlov’s dogs. ‘Will the honourable gentleman give way?’ Fred ploughed on. The cries of ‘give way’ intensified. He looked around, his eyes alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends – a smug young man of modest origins who ...”

“... enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us ...”

“... customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one out again, thus wasting her fee). In her shopping basket her swag, swiped furtively from the shelves, would be buried under the groceries. It was difficult to know what to do with ...”

“... with the staple industries stagnating and over two million people out of work, Harold Macmillan rose in the Commons to press for a radical policy of industrial reconstruction and public investment. What, he asked, were the arguments against public capital expenditure? ‘What is the case of the Treasury, the people who really govern England from the Box ...”

“... seemed to me a small watercolour belonging to Tate Britain, entitled – usually with a question mark – Los and Orc. Identities, even if here the two names from Blake’s mythology seem to apply, are difficult. Let us agree to call Los the figure of imaginative and political energy in human history as Blake conceived it, and Orc that same energy taking ...”

“... Lewis, nursing his obsessive and in some ways unspeakable grief for his lost daughter, with Joe Rose, with Leonard Marnham, with June Tremaine, and with Briony in Atonement, of whom McEwan writes that she felt she lacked secrets, and could not have an interesting life without them. ‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is ...”

“... and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... 2003. In early 2007, he heard about the death in Mosul of a young soldier from California called Mark Daily, who had left behind a statement explaining his reasons for having volunteered to fight. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Daily had thought hard about a war whose justice he had initially doubted, and eventually felt the call to take ...”

“... big stuff – the national plan, the new approach, to expand or die’. Industrial production rose by 11 per cent in the year after the pliable Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 election budget – a completely unsustainable gallop. Macmillan’s obsession with expansion and his utter neglect of inflation were of course a reaction to the bitter experience of the ...”

“... the Spectator did not hope for better than ‘tenuous’ relations with any government. My spirits rose when I heard this story. They have been rising ever since. Whatever the Lawson-Wilson mode may be called, there is nothing fogeyish about it. By way of contrast, the pseudo-chivalrous defences of grand people’s privacy rights – the Queen Mum, the man ...”

“... participants displayed, especially in the course of this year. The faster and more steeply prices rose, the more investors had to lose, and consequently, the jumpier they became. Despite the warning signs, investors, analysts and brokers have all been caught off guard. No one seemed to think that a reversal could be so sudden, or that prices in New ...”

“... a powerful mind’. Various candidates have been put forward as possible models for Casaubon – Mark Pattison, with his quick-witted young wife Emilia; old Dr Robert Brabant, who had attracted the young Mary Ann and who repeatedly failed to finish the scholarly projects he began; and the self-absorbed Herbert Spencer. But when asked to identify the ...”

“... and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript was a disjointed jumble of ideas about sex, men, women, Wobblies, revolution, love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights ...”