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“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... eldritch folksy pop music transfers to Australia in a welter of guitars, penny-whistles, Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, drugs, inspiration and greed. All this casts a spell on the escapist Richard Miller. Darcy, spokesman for an alternative theology, had learnt that there were ‘two people inside me: one who was weak and sentimental; the other somebody who ...”

“... career as designer and manufacturer. There are more than seventy previously unpublished letters to Thomas Wardle, manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, which prove exhaustively how careful he was about the dyeing and printing of their fabrics and to what lengths he went to get the colours right. He liked nothing better than putting on smock and ...”

“... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... resources and sustainability in general. But ideals can rapidly switch around. When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright explored the possibilities of the extended city in his Broadacre City scheme, he saw the automobile as the saviour of the common man, the route to a democratic utopia. Now, for the good of our health and the planet, we are being asked to ...”

“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that his wife (who tried to kill herself ...”

“... is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved a cypress he’d seen in ...”

“... Lambert was 23) is to my mind a much better piece than even its future publisher, Alan Frank, thought (‘no single idea seems to last for more than a couple of bars’); and the jaw drops at Edmund Rubbra’s ‘rhythmic monotony and … melodic paucity’, criticisms Rubbra might just as well, or ill, have made of Schoenberg, Webern and their ...”

“... environment than ours. Peter was, I think, a political scientist; there were early editions of Thomas Hobbes on the shelves. Ilse typed up John Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s journals. Only occasionally did my father seem to feel that the refugees might have been a little impatient with provincial life in the South Pacific. My friend Graham Percy (who ...”

“... that I hadn’t realised could exist: its intertwined plots, its stories within stories, its frank contemplation of mental illness and suicide. It was the first book I ever read that was about a writer, the first with a mentally unstable narrator, the first that employed metafiction, the first that was discursive and philosophical by design. I would ...”

“... in his model of decency and upstandingness. Even if he doesn’t mind a Marxist scholar such as Thomas Hodgkin (in fact, he loved Hodgkin and supplies a strong, sympathetic portrait), contradiction is by and large a failing, hard to distinguish from dishonesty, or moral blindness. What drives this failing? Mostly high-mindedness; a wish for the world to be ...”

“... mix he found in his own father, ‘a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish’. Thomas Stevenson was a curious but morbid man for whom darkness most immediately suggested the fiery regions of hell.His only son suffered from a terrible cough – ‘I love my native air, but it does not love me,’ Louis wrote – and could often be found, at ...”

“... Reformation; the first major ‘constellation’ contains More, the Italian city designers, and Thomas Müntzer. Strange companion-stars, one might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely ...”

“... became familiar companions to many an amateur. ‘To a person uninstructed in natural history,’ Thomas Huxley observed, ‘his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned toward the wall.’ Elementary lessons on geology, astronomy, physiology and numerous other ...”