“... clearly on the map, debates their pros and cons with subtlety and sophistication, and should be read by anyone interested in the calamitous and ultimately exterminatory path taken by German history in the 20th ...”

“... convey as clearly as possible the suffering of the Jews who were their object. Neither author has read very widely or deeply, and neither book rests on any original research. McMillan in particular only skims the surface of the topics he is dealing with. In a book that claims with a considerable degree of chutzpah to be the first and so far only one devoted ...”

“... to continue with his business life and with his writings, which included a vaporous and little-read philosophical treatise, On the Mechanism of the Spirit, a set of patriotic poems, a further attack on the backwardness of the Prussian state and a plea for European economic unity. It was the outbreak of war in 1914 that brought him a political role. He was ...”

“... them to diminish the hopes belonging to that far better life to which this is only the entrance. Read one way, letters like this one take us back to the Faraday of his first biographers – humble, contented and hopeful of a future state, both for his soul and for his science. We may, however, prefer to see in it a different story about the fate of ...”

“... Habilitationsschrift: weighty, well argued, thorough and deeply researched. It may not be an easy read – the fact that its author isn’t a native speaker of English shows at many points – but it is most certainly an indispensable ...”

“... structured performance that allows no room for irony or metaphor. As Verghese says, ‘I had read through the chart and had understood the medical elements of the case. But the story of this couple was not there.’ Somehow he has rediscovered his ability to touch the lives of the people he cared for. What he doesn’t always do is develop ideas from ...”

“... hangers-on, ‘terrorists’ and the occasional gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the ...”

“... not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 ...”

“... children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories and at every table children reading on their own. This library is one of those institutions that Mark Littlewood, the head of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said would make ‘a useful retail ...”

“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag. At one stage both fathers were ensnared in the argument about the most appropriate capital for the West Indies Federation: an argument as vexed as it was futile since the Federation lasted only a few months ...”

“... It takes me so long to read the ’paper, said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John Berryman, Dream Song When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier ...”

“... precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.Now aged 77, the ...”

“... includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author). He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... them. Devotion purports to consist largely of a series of notes set down by a Berliner named Richard Schroubeck, who is distraught because Hannah, his lover, has left him. The notes are intended ‘to lure her back’, ‘to bridge over a dangerous interruption of our dialogue’. When he does eventually meet her once more he thrusts the manuscript at ...”