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“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... accurately his chronicler will record his adventures.’) The writer stumbles across characters reading his books, only to be told: ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just a book.’ Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand ...”

“... light on the issue of whether ameliorism worked. Did the experts do any good? Charles Madge and Peter Willmott compare Inner-City Poverty in Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers ...”

“... contexts – compatible, too, with our having evolved reasoning skills that are not. Consider reading and writing. It is not greatly surprising that evolved organisms of the kind we are might, having developed language, later start to write things down. This did not happen through the spread of genetic mutations, and literacy is only loosely coupled to ...”

“... irrecuperably lost. The infrastructure for this theory of kitsch is provided by Olalquiaga’s reading of Benjamin who, while he never wrote about kitsch as such, distinguished between melancholic and nostalgic memory – in his writing on Baudelaire and Proust. Benjamin was also fascinated by bibelots and bric-à-brac, the commodified clutter of the ...”

“... way that every third chapter ends with something of a cliffhanger, inviting me to look forward to reading the next instalment. I know a little about the Victorian literary scene, so I am aware that this stylistic device derived from the original publication of the novel in a journal, and was designed to entice its readers into buying the next issue to see ...”

“... committed.ACatholic​ himself, Ingrams wishes that Belloc had been more truly converted, both by reading the gospels and by paying more attention to Chesterton’s classic works of apologetics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. I’m not sure the latter would have helped. The Everlasting Man is Chesterton’s major work of theology, a blockbusting reply to ...”

“... the parties. Each author – a Tory MP, a Labour MP and a Liberal Democrat life peer – is worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or ...”

“... Rothko married an illustrator, Mell Beistle. He gave her a copy of Kafka’s The Trial; he was reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Now in his forties, Rothko had had one-man shows and was written about a little, but no canvas he had completed so far would be recognised as a Rothko by anyone who only knows what he painted in the Fifties. His work was a bit ...”

“... Roman curia which analyses the impact of the canon law system on the individual through a close reading of six cases spread over the period 1653-1923. Most surprising of all, the general cultural context is not given the attention it needs in order to make the description and the narrative intelligible. Surprising, because the author carried out the ...”

“... application. A constant stream of hardships and discomforts is recorded. The index makes painful reading: ‘Suffers from ague ... apoplectic numbness ... boils ... bowels ... colds ... discouragement ... dizziness ... face ache ... fever ... flea bites ... headaches ... indigestion ... rheumatic inflammation ... the sulks ... toothache ...”

“... crimson-dyed hair, and she had a very strong Scottish accent.’ Her distresses make more poignant reading than Epstein’s critical reverses. At one point she invited his mistress Kathleen round to talk things over. When they were alone ‘she said, “I am going to kill you” ... produced a gun from inside her ankle-length skirt, went on talking and then ...”

“... history. London, and most other modern cities, are texts so glossed and patched that no single reading of any part of them is possible. Spiro Kostof’s The City Shaped deals with elements which impose patterns. The evidence is in the plans, drawings and aerial photographs which are the best illustrations in his book. The pointed stars of old defence ...”

“... one day recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale ...”

“... it. Viewers, who can sit down to study the work close up, are engaged in concentrated looking, reading and thinking. The last time I passed it, there were twenty of them.A similar atmosphere can be felt in the Fluxus room, where again there is a plethora of small objects, books, images, toys and suchlike. My own most concentrated viewing was of Paul ...”