“... 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 ...”

“... which introduced these things into the emotional lives of the mass of the population. No one can read Quaife’s book and still believe that. Lawrence Stone could surely not have written as he did in his Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 if he had had that knowledge of the really telling evidence which Quaife thinks he should have had. The other ...”

“... his father’s annoyance. He liked the smell of his grandfather’s pipe and, even before he could read them, the feel and presence of the many books on the shelves. Ashbery’s father was a vigorous man who had been a semi-pro baseball player. His son hated sport and physical exertion of any kind, particularly farmwork. Once he had learned to ...”

“... Wales is currently staging a large loan exhibition of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced ...”

“... dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the ...”

“... almost be called thrillers, their plots resembling sensational news items. With Norman Lewis we read of plans to assassinate statesmen in Egypt and Libya, with evil American agents blackmailing honest Britishers. John Collee tells of a wonder cure for cancer devised by a Hindu mystic in a Scottish city where surgeons’ knives are used too readily and ...”

“... and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our regular weekly visits. I had learned to read quite early when I was five or six by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy ...”

“... Of the thousands​ of people who visited the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician and clergyman Richard Napier around the beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often ...”

“... new-look Penguin Classics. I thought for a moment about taking the LRB’s review copy to read on the plane. But only for a moment. How long will it be before they start to ask at check-in: ‘Did you pack your bags yourself? Are you carrying any sharp objects in your cabin luggage? Nail-scissors? Razor-blades? A copy of the Koran?’ Setting off the ...”

“... can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself ...”

“... Western text apart from the Bible. This makes it difficult – perhaps uniquely difficult – to read. Critical opinion is deeply entrenched, and most of it sounds as though it were originally uttered by retired colonels. He is ‘the father of the West’ (Haeker); ‘the classic of all Europe’ (Eliot); and, worst of all, a panegyrist of empire: ‘the ...”

“... It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be ...”

“... the eye of the brunette. He had no special mission like James Bond. He didn’t play the lute or read Le Monde. Why was it he on whom their sights were set? For let’s make no mistake, the women pick Which men go down in history as avid Tail-chasers with the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy ...”

“... who has one shows me the rings of Saturn or the mountains of the Moon and I was carried away by Richard Holmes’s account in The Age of Wonder of the heroic campaigns of observation and telescope-making carried out by Herschel and his sister. In the 1950s I was gripped by descriptions of the casting and polishing of the 200-inch mirror of the Hale ...”

“... down – is in part responsible for his widespread neglect. Even so broad-minded and widely-read a philosopher as Arthur Danto has said that he finds Dewey’s work without interest, because lacking in ‘structure’. Ayer found (and, I imagine, Williams finds) in Dewey only a rubbery amorphous mass of neologisms (‘problematic ...”