“... make his own tools before he can achieve anything. This, presumably, is the primitive need which Peter Mann’s From Author to Reader is intended to supply. Mann’s perspective is severely sociological, and his aim to lay a groundwork of conceptual starting-points. From Author to Reader has a superficially theoretic aspect: but it aspires to construct a ...”

“... old people to football hooliganism, from battered women to inner-city policing. Who wants to read about poverty or the inner city any more? Perhaps it’s just as well that nowadays the only people who get into the first-class carriages of Inter City trains, heading for Important Meetings, are mechanical engineers and experts on computer technology. At ...”

“... prices had gone way up. The sum bought 13 oranges, or eight ham rolls (the ham so thin we could read print through it), or several yards of liquorice ribbon, so Alex saved quite a bit of his lunch allowance. These savings played a part in his career, for a very early interest in chemistry was nourished by ‘a Home Chemistry set’ in a pink cardboard box ...”

“... imagination endorses the cleric’s simple-minded concept of national loyalty, it is possible to read much of his verse as a protest against what Hugh Haughton terms ‘the indignity of King Log’. Haughton argues that Hill seems to yearn ‘for real authority and real title, the kind of transcendence embodied in a language of kingship derived from the past ...”

“... Peter Lessing​ died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”

“... Kiev princes to Politburo rule, from the atrocities of the forced Europeanisation introduced by Peter the Great to Stalin’s Sovietisation, and from the Polish invasion of Moscow in the early 17th century to Moscow’s imposition of martial law on Poland in 1980, the so-called Russian soul has swung between enlightenment and barbarism, humanism and ...”

“... ask for news of Mr Gladstone, thinking of him as like a story that never ran out. His father would read from the paper over their tea, over the scraping of cutlery, delivering the speeches word for word in his thick, swelling accent, pausing between sentences to scoop something off his plate, breathing loudly through his nostrils as he chewed, his eyes running ...”

“... the last general election can no longer be ducked: what price the Return of the Prodigal? How you read this question probably depends on your preconceptions. The Labour Party has won the battle of institutions, as its supporters always assured us it would. In its hour of crisis it hung on and did not fall apart – unlike the Alliance, when it was ...”

“... the case in Egyptian hard stone figures. The economy of modelling in some jade pieces can also be read as an expression of the hardness of the material. But hardness is relative, and changes in technology encouraged sculptors to meet the challenge and cut jade into complex shapes. By the late 19th century there were tools available which allowed hard stone ...”

“... are one people.’ The Westerners whipped out their pocket calculators and did not like what they read. The West German Left in particular distrusted the unification process. They feared a revival of German chauvinism and great power mania, an expectation that the Gulf War has negated. West Germans voted for Chancellor Kohl in last December’s general ...”

“... Times investigative reporting. However, as with the histories of the popes, we don’t have to read much between the lines to realise how disastrously the business was mismanaged. There was no coherence of purpose from the outset. Crucially, and disastrously, it was never wholly clear whether the so-called ‘key-stroking’ issue was as central to ...”

“... is olfactory, and it seems possible that they call more when they have fewer scent marks to read. Levels of aggression, fearfulness and submission are expressed by flattened cars, back-arching, grins and the elevation or depression of the tail. They are lightly-built, long-legged, and have a bushy tail for mid-air control. They have evolved a body ...”

“... violent surfaces and convoluted space reach a peak of expressiveness which it is hard not to read as fury. He both deprecated his own work and thought it better than that of his contemporaries: he was ‘better than Modigliani, Chagall and Krémègne. Some day I will destroy my canvases but they are too cowardly to do it.’ In 1923 the American ...”

“... hundred years earlier). For this orgy of metagastronomy, originally in six fat volumes, Athenaios read at least a thousand comedies; and it’s to him that we owe most of the surviving fragments of Archestratos’ Nice Things to Eat, a foodie’s guide to the Mediterranean in the metre and manner of Homer (‘Sing, Muse, of the dinners, many and ...”