“... a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at the top placed him at the head of the Fluency ...”

“... chess ... coming back in to write, for a few hours, in a language few around him could even read’, is also a part of this America, its reminder of what can now be forgotten. But all of this changes after 1956, when a new wave of Hungarian refugees arrives, among them the brilliant, hungry, ambitious young scholar ...”

“... background information could not easily be found. In Patrick Power’s excellent translation I read The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht) with enjoyment but without suspecting that it was intended as a parody of a whole sub-genre of Gaelic misery memoirs. I read The Best of Myles through a fog of cheerful ignorance about the ...”

“... a single pregnant line: Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas? – a question which can be read as asking either whether ‘Lesbian Sappho’ taught girls how to love, or how to love girls. Sappho’s erotic predilections have remained a stumbling block for many, to be explained away or desexualised: witness the late 19th century’s interpretation ...”

“... Venetian buildings and their history he is able to expand terse notes into likely conjectures, and read social history in a pattern of payments. These are as much histories of what went on as of what went up. Both books are at their best when putting you in the shoes of the passers-by who saw the Louvre colonnade and the Cà d’Oro rise. You stand alongside ...”

“... yawn. Farewell to the working class? By the time of the Labour Party Conference I’d had time to read the 1983 Election study, How Britain votes which explodes the notion that class-voting is on the wane. This is a good example of my appearance-reality theorem. The idea that home ownership, consumerism, holidays abroad, were undermining class solidarity had ...”

“... who in the late 1530s or early 1540s became so excited on hearing the New Testament being read to him in English that he decided he would have to learn to read it for himself, did so, purchased his own New Testament, told his mother off for worshipping the crucifix, and for his pains was nearly murdered by his irate ...”

“... by the accidental colouring, and the work was finished. Contemporary comments (which can be read picture by picture in Butlin and Joll) show that even his most daring effects were understood by an appreciable number of his contemporaries: it is arrogant to assume that passing time has necessarily given us better access to his work. It ...”

“... guy she planned to install as a building supervisor. It took the foreman twenty minutes just to read out the verdicts. Indiana’s first contribution is to give the story a quiet start. A relatively quiet start: he gives you the fraud and the theft before he gives you the murder and the incest. His second is to suppress the trial – although his narrative ...”

“... in history arises in this way, explicitly or implicitly, and historians would be less widely read if they did not cater for it. Yet their own professional concerns, so they disdainfully affirm, are otherwise. Their lack of interest in the vulgarisation of their discipline is not just a matter of snobbery: it is a matter of fashion. For by the time works ...”

“... the man against his times, the man in the round, as seen by a scholar and admirer, will want to read Mr Williams’s own full-length portrait. The diary is, moreover, incomplete in a number of crucial respects. First, it falls silent on 9 October 1956. Thus it excludes many – indeed most – of the major and traumatic events of the Gaitskell ...”

“... Elderfield’s catalogue essay ‘Seeing Bonnard’, about the way the paintings are scanned and read, contributes to their demythologising. Elderfield takes for granted the pleasures afforded by the paintings: his text is rewarding if you are curious about what goes on between brain and eye when you look at a painting, or if you are interested in the ...”

“... appetite and breadth of response were very wide – his collecting shows this – and one comes to read his complaints of his own inadequacy as a confession of the impossibility of absorbing and combining aspects of all the work he admired. There was, to start with, the problem of reconciling tonal and linear methods of representation. In one classical ...”

“... in precisely that line; and of the new kinds of painting that followed – you can, if you like, read them as glosses, variations, sometimes caricatures of what he did – none combine truth to the nature of the physical world and skill in the art of painting to the same degree, but some are more powerful. Cézanne made still-life monumental at the expense ...”

“... alarmingly well informed – if there was a recent study of a topic under discussion he had often read and digested it, even if his officials hadn’t yet got hold of it,’ one civil servant recalled. ‘And he was exceptionally open minded and ready to pick up ideas wherever he could.’ He would read eclectically, and ...”