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“... to what he took to be the suggestion that he was now callow. I was puzzled at first that he could read the offending locution in that way, and I assured him that I had not intended it thus, pointing out that it did not logically bear that entailment, any more than use of the phrase ‘younger days’ would imply that he was now young. In fact, I had chosen ...”

“... a Canadian poet, wrote in to say that he thought ‘the four pages of this essay the finest I have read in the LRB, this issue or any other’. Before publishing the letter we sent it to Frank. ‘What an odd fan letter that was,’ he replied while thanking us for sending it. ‘Still, no harm done.’ In 2004 Profile published an anthology of LRB pieces, for ...”

“... close competitor was brought out from the shadows where he now lurks, uncollected and unread. For Richard Holt Hutton was a prodigious and impressive critic. And unlike Arnold he made literary (and theological) criticism his profession. Hutton was the author of about seven thousand reviews and essays. He edited the Spectator from 1861 until his death in ...”

“... on a rosary’) and is reunited with people she knew at secondary school, including the methodical Richard Gittens. Although male and an outsider, he works devotedly for the community and shares its values, unlike his wife, who thinks the way the nuns live is ‘unnatural’. The novel gives no credence to that prejudice: the stereotypes of convent life as a ...”

“... in Greek studies had been made, but their effect had been restricted, since few were able to read the language easily – in particular, the difficult language of the greatest writers. The first country in which serious efforts were made to see Ancient Greece directly was Germany. The efforts would hardly have been possible without the work of ...”

“... the ‘did he or didn’t he do it with his wife?’ What about the modern reader? Will he read one volume, let alone two, on the life of H.M. Stanley? The justification for a new biography of a much-written-about subject tends to be either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does ...”

“... to cost those who offer it so little and benefit those who receive it so much. ‘Why, then,’ Richard Sennett asks, ‘should it be in short supply?’ Though Sennett frequently defines such scarcity as a lack of ‘mutual respect’ – as if none of us, no matter who we are, gets enough of it – a good many of his examples and much of his analysis ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... bark their way ashore through the rushes. That’s how I felt reading the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning and almost universally adored (some reviewers reached for their Tolstoy; others forbade any comparisons at all) Narrow Road to the Deep North: watching tourists hoaxed by polystyrene. It used to be that a novel would put ...”

“... the literary politics of the Romantics, Byron’s poetics, his digs at Southey and Coleridge. He read up on ‘the Pantisocratic society of Aspheterists’ (Coleridge), and even perused Southey’s poem Madoc, about ‘the Welsh prince, long believed by his countrymen to have discovered America in 1170’ (Chambers Biographical Dictionary). Muldoon’s ...”

“... as Charny repeats over and again, every chivalrous man should aim, and whose achievement, as Richard Kaeuper neatly summarises it in his introduction, involved ‘the entire cluster of warrior virtues; great strength, hardiness and skill in using weapons on horseback and on foot, as well as the courage and determination that must inform success in ...”

“... It is said that, the night before the capture of Quebec from the French in 1759, General Wolfe read Gray’s Elegy aloud to his officers as they crossed the St Lawrence River. ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,’ he is supposed to have said. Presumably his men didn’t suddenly start to worry that they were being led into combat by some absurd literary connoisseur ...”

“... reason to look for him. The unique degree of Pynchon’s withdrawal from public scrutiny can be read as a refusal to surrender himself to forms of cultural power wherein knowledge of human life has become, in his view, inseparable from the effort to warp and control it, to reduce it to those compulsive plot-makings of which he is himself a master and a ...”

“... this decision is evidence, therefore, of a most important change in his life. But the entry can be read quite otherwise – as marking the perpetuation of his problems and in terms by which he deludes even himself. What sounds like an affirmation of free will is really a denial of it, a determination to thwart it. Can a man be said to believe in free will ...”

“... and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).1 There are people who will only read Westerns or Crime and others who prefer not to read any book unless, like the works of Maya Angelou, it manages somehow to have a self-help tinge. (‘Self-Improvement’ is now, quite often, a section in your local ...”