“... himself is there to tell us, in his author’s preface, what we can expect as a dividend from our reading: some of his favourite recipes (not to be taken literally), a passing glance at one or two of his favourite pictures, and a vicarious stay at one of his most cherished hotels – the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. Since he has been so ...”

“... clear and freshen the air. Beside Raymond Carver’s posthumous collection, the others I have been reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ...”

“... of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their ...”

“... émigré organisations as they competed for CIA largesse makes dismal, though at times risible, reading. The émigrés used all sorts of unscrupulous tricks to do one another down and monopolise American handouts, denouncing rivals as Soviet agents (which some of them evidently were) while lying brazenly about their contacts in the current Soviet Union and ...”

“... Russia, where it won two literary prizes, and in Germany. One explanation for this may be that the reading public has a greater appetite for experimental fiction than the cynics believe. Another may be the nature of Shishkin’s experiment, which relates to the enclosure, rather than to the entirety of its contents. Difficult as some passages are, there are ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... to be, or wanted to be seen to be, by herself in particular. Such choices, she would have found by reading Confessions, are utterly spurious; indeed to think of one’s life in terms of them is just one more sign of corruption. You read Confessions to find out what it is to become and to be a believer. To live a life in which there is nothing but God. ‘All ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature a number of the children or ...”

“... we have yet to meet. ‘I’ is a textual version of Milan Kundera, author of the novel we are reading, and (in Immortality) of other, mentioned novels, Life is elsewhere, for example. He is not of course writing before our very eyes, and he is not exactly reporting on the way he writes. He is miming the art of the novel, producing a picture of the sort of ...”

“... and appropriate, that people will always refer to Scott Moncrieff when they speak seriously about reading Proust in English, but I’m not sure that a new translation has to ‘better’ his version, conspicuously or not. It’s unfortunate that neither Hazzard nor the editors at Farrar, Straus remembered that Prendergast’s first name is Christopher rather ...”

“... amount of time Bill had ever spent alone with his father. He had brought a book, and despite not reading it or even flicking through its pages, had preserved an air of intent throughout the journey, gripping it tightly in both hands so that the spine and the far edge of the cover were darkened by sweat. If his father noticed this, he gave no sign. He had a ...”

“... at exactly the same moment.’ A ceiling fan is rattling slightly in the room in which I am reading Dehaene’s book. I think I can process the word ‘occupied’ – the last word I read before putting the book aside for a moment – while also taking in the rattle. Can I really? It does take a certain kind of settling-in, but there they are, the two ...”

“... exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio documentary he made. ‘I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas,’ he wrote to a friend in 1965, ‘and I find that this is growing ...”

“... non-Jewish middle class. Nor did all Jews fit the rational-liberal stereotype. Some, like the poet Peter Altenberg, would have been more at home in the Place Pigalle. Others, like Friedrich Eckstein – typically, the university-educated son of an industrialist – moved from vegetarian Wagnerism through theosophy to the occultism that in Vienna became the ...”