“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it. The novel is a satire of ...”

“... or alienation effect, so that the reader doesn’t get too complacent. Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists (chiefly Smith and Ricardo) had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour for the generation of profit. If the words in his book ...”

“... and self-serving, he gives vent to his long-standing resentment against what he chose to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of his own, and it is essential to be aware of them, preferably by reading this journal in ...”

“... Outer Maroo ‘is thick with coded messages, but the messages are legible only to those who can read the secretive earth’. This requires a tipping of the bush-hat to aboriginal culture, though the Murris have moved out for the duration of the story, apart from Ethel, who ‘sits there, cross-legged in the red dust at the edge of the bora rings, smiling to ...”

“... fingertips of individual submarine commanders, out of touch with the rest of the world, forced to read the meaning of silence. How should ordinary people react to the prospect of these calamities? In my view, the avoidance of nuclear warfare is a consideration of overriding priority – something more important than national sovereignty, ‘face’ or ...”

“... that early morning, 5 September 1957, when he walked to the news-stand at 66th and Broadway to read Gilbert Millstein’s review in the New York Times: ‘Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The sun also rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of ...”

“... Trevelyan’s tiresomeness, of course, ran in the family. What Strachey could not swallow when he read Macaulay – ‘A preposterous optimism fills his pages’ – was the Whig interpretation of history at full strength. It smacked of Victorian smugness, and one can practically feel Strachey’s knee jerk. His own values set the cosmopolitan French ...”

“... though they worshipped Sarapis and married their sisters, continued to speak, to write and to read Greek. Now and again they threw away their books and papers; rubbish-dumps built up around the town; sand drifted in from the desert, and covered the dumps; and there they remained, preserved by the rainless climate, until 1897. Then the archaeologists ...”

“... Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of J.M. Barrie’s ‘Lost Boys’, in later life called Peter Pan ‘that terrible masterpiece’. Brigid Brophy, having reread Little Women and its sequels, dried her eyes and blown her nose, resolved that ‘the only honourable course was to come out into the open and admit that the dreadful books are masterpieces ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... of the Tin Tent During the first push on the Somme a temporary captain in the Royal Engineers – Peter Nissen a Canadian designed an experimental steel tent that could be erected from stacked materials by an NCO and eight men in 110 minutes so the Nissen hut is the descendant and enriched relation of the Elephant and other similar steel structures that were ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”