“... of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh. Washington presents his subject as the rise of the Western guru: in fact, charisma, faith, leader and follower, have never been absent from religion or from history. In the ...”

“... Laing’s later writings with the criterion of scholarly rectitude is perhaps the wrong way to read him. We might do better to see him, not as an investigator of empirical histories, but as a sectarian preacher inveighing against a generalised failing of modern life. What we are given is an insistent highlighting of the worst case as a means to sustain the ...”

“... and ‘was more easily removed from nose and cheeks’. And it is a long time since I read anything as funny as his mock-serious discussion of flatulence, and in particular of the potentially disastrous consequences of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived in France since 1951, has many ...”

“... In the centre of the Herald’s skeletally staffed newsroom a bank of monitors displays the most read online articles. Spiers’s were often among them. During the dispute about the piece, Newsquest, which bought the Herald in 2003, announced that up to 25 journalists would be made redundant in the third round of job losses in less than a year. Spiers admits ...”

“... I first read Letter to Patience in a mud-walled bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s Parlour: the drain wrinkly with rainbows, the car sunk to its rusted wheel hubs in the dust, door jamb, handbills for Double Crown and Star, thin slits of light, reggae, voices, a gust of laughter ...”

“... notions of an upper-class, leisured community of ideal readers. To do well, you needed to have read a great deal; at those British universities still working this old-style English (which must be more than half of them), students from unlettered backgrounds are at a strong disadvantage. The great selling-point in Leavis’s system was that, on the novel in ...”

“... jokers trade in is much more volatile. It congratulates itself on an audience-defying perversity. Read the list of ingredients: argument, intelligence, spiteful syntax, information overload. A negative dialectic that can live uxoriously with itself, assertive in its modesty. Poetry. An embarrassing word. The project is anachronistic. Well-meaning (but ...”

“... to mind. But it turned out that there was no mystery, no sinister revelation to give weight to Peter Ackroyd’s appropriation of Hawksmoor’s buildings as stages for the malevolent and occult. Although the burials had been decent and officially sanctioned, the bodies were there contrary to the intentions of the Commissioners appointed under an Act of ...”

“... Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin’s book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact one of its great virtues is that it doesn’t try to minimise how difficult The Cantos is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those inseparable from the nature of the enterprise (i ...”

“... married a member of the Communist Party, an exiled German, with whom she had her youngest child, Peter. When she split up with Gottfried, she took Peter aged two and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing on a plane and landed in London, staying with all sorts of hospitable postwar people with sometimes tragically spare ...”

“... squad. Like many US authors, Beschloss assumes that his readers have a week of free time to read a book, which must account for the large numbers of partially read volumes on American shelves. But while the book is very long, over seven hundred pages before the notes start, the subject merits exhaustive treatment and ...”

“... being passed on to another. Phillips’s book has an urgency and intensity which demands that you read more: it is not so much a matter of enjoying it as feeling obliged to finish it, to take account of what the voices he has imagined have to say. Christopher Burns’s hero, Maurice Fretwell, now warden of a nature reserve somewhere on the north-west coast of ...”

“... world art’, but writing that tells you more than you can see for yourself and makes you want to read on is harder to come by. That is what Bell provides, with clarity and a wonderfully sustained faculty of response. A practical device he uses to carry you through is the long caption. He accepts that some readers will skim and dip; captions can offer a ...”

“... to Wilson: It is possible – admittedly by over-simplifying what the memorandum says – to read it as simply saying that the Americans are right, that the North Vietnamese are wrong and that there is nothing we can do about it … read in this sense, the memorandum might touch off a rather unprofitable discussion in ...”

“... When I started reading Bliss I hadn’t read Mr Carey’s first book, The Fat Man in History, though like everybody else I had heard the stories acclaimed in terms which made the prospect of his first novel very attractive. It is therefore both surprising and regrettable that I have to say that Bliss is a bad novel, though by a talented author ...”