“... her wedding feast and a generous dowry. Jeffreys also paid for her needy cousin Jane Gorton’s more modest clothes, as well as her rent, and, when she died, her funeral expenses. Even her servants received clothes: Jeffreys paid her maidservants the usual low wage of thirty or forty shillings a year, but often gave them wedding dresses when they left to ...”

“... low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good for the ...”

“... the jury was right: such a ride is straightforwardly impossible. Chatham to York is a journey of more than two hundred miles, as is London to York. In the longest-established endurance horse race, the one-hundred-mile Tevis Cup, the record is held by a horse called R.C. Hans, who completed the course in 10 hours and 46 minutes; only nine times since ...”

“... his way through reform school before circumstances began to carry him in and out of prison, more often in than out. Impatient and guileless, he was easy meat for other crooks. A friend roped him in to do a job on the home of a wealthy Hollywood producer – ‘all we had to do was walk in and fill our pockets’ – but the producer was broke and Braly ...”

“... Valley begins to seem one of those uncanny spots where the skin between ordinary life and story is more than usually permeable. Through being imagined intensely enough, it becomes a signifying somewhere, a fitting place for a writer of Munro’s stature and provenance to project her beginning, connecting herself with a long tradition of gifts that have sprung ...”

“... Could​ anything be more unexpected, in the world of art criticism, than the appearance of a book by Rosalind Krauss on Willem de Kooning? Krauss is a wide-ranging critic and historian of modernism, the author of an influential book on Picasso, but she has been associated above all with minimalist and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman ...”

“... Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories. The Fire Next Time consists of a brief, hortatory letter to a young nephew about being a black American, and an eloquent memoir/meditation on the same subject, which includes an account ...”

“... Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its title suggests, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is sensational stuff, both in the Victorian and modern senses of ‘sensation’. But what ...”

“... locates the Dickensian ambivalence about death in Dickens the man. Stewart’s critical method is more ambitious and fashionably trusts the text rather than the tale or the teller. His main proposition runs thus: as a form, the novel is dedicated to knowledge, to talking, to communication; when it confronts that whereof it cannot know – namely, death ...”

“... his desk: ‘Reading Rots the Mind.’ A young theoretician friend of ours stated his reasons more explicitly: ‘I don’t see why I should read the bloody nonsense other people write when I can read my own papers.’ I find that young scientists tend to read too little, especially in subjects that are peripheral to their own narrow problem. Medawar ...”

“... so different from the gallant Southern generals who led their own troops in person. There is more than a whiff here of that traditional antithesis (of which every age since Homer seems to throw up a variant instance) between the gentlemanly valour of skilled personal fighting and the mean upstart butchery of the missile weapon, or whatever new refinement ...”

“... youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at Westminster, which required extensive repairs as early as 1868. Despite these calamities, the Victorians were bent on adopting the Arthurian ideal as the supreme guide to conduct. Courtesy, gentleness, honour, physical ...”

“... pleasure – and this has allowed him an insider’s appreciation of some of the subtler or more material effects of art. And, as a writer, he has evolved a distinctive style – though, so naturally does his prose read, it seems odd to talk of evolution – which enables him to convey with great precision the results of the eager, exploratory way he ...”

“... there don’t seem to be many modern writers who care about the book, or have been marked by it. Thomas Mann wrote a wonderful essay about it, but its moral world seems very far from his own. Faulkner said he used to read Don Quixote once a year, but you wouldn’t guess this from his writing. The influence of Don Quixote on Latin American fiction has been ...”

“... because Oswald is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people ...”