“... afterwards the resulting picture was splashed across the front page of the Sun. The ‘story’ read: EYES FRONT! Sexy soldier Sam Fox inspects her loyal troops in the war of Wapping.   Bravely pointing her bazookas at the enemy lines, she advanced on the Sun’s besieged new offices yesterday.   And repelling print union pickets, she thrust ...”

“... of the material in the direct possession of the Freud Archives, was undertaken in Jerusalem by Peter Swales; and the draft notes were prepared for the simultaneous German edition of the letters by Michael Schröter. Masson’s contribution was evidently to polish and edit the translation and to contribute those limited notes which he considered necessary ...”

“... On 15 February 1902, James Joyce, aged 20, read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance. Joyce spoke as if he were introducing an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about ...”

“... It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book, containing the 2,500 greatest thoughts. Hubbard went down in the Lusitania, but his book was advertised with great vigour for the benefit of tongue-tied partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche ...”

“... ale. I fell in with his plan. I had met the International Socialists. My new chum was called Peter Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert ...”

“... intention of ‘a layman’s Domesday Book the scholar can use, and a scholar’s the layman can read’. It is the first which presents the text in parallel translation, in county parts, for the entire document. The text has only once before been set and printed complete, in Farley’s edition, the preparation of which had taken 16 years. The surviving ...”

“... thousands who attended his meetings – yes, even in Sheffield – but to the millions who only read about them. Professional football was catching on as a spectator sport in much the same way. The politics of vicarious participation did not have to wait for the invention of the cathode-ray tube, even though poor Gladstone had to make do with newsprint to ...”

“... that of the Ustasha. In President Franjo Tudjman’s ‘history’ of this period, Wastelands, we read that the victims of the war-time Jasenovac concentration camp – estimated at thirty thousand – really owed their fate to their fellow inmates, not to their Croat jailers. But this hardly excuses the flattening of Vukovar or the destruction of Dubrovnik ...”

“... Walk, scheduled to take place the next day. On the plane back to Los Angeles, where I live now, I read a little filler item about it, headlined ‘Boring Is Over, But Tunnel Still Dull.’ That summed it up. Yet, in a way, I was relieved. I had been invited to visit the Channel Tunnel shortly after the Northridge earthquake, which rampaged through our house ...”

“... which had faced Labour in 1964. Sir Denis is reserved about his own role in those years but, if we read between the lines, it is plain that he was most sceptical of the attempt to open a new chapter of pay policy in 1972 and, later, opposed to the course of confrontation on which the Government set itself with Phase Three, and held to in spite of the ...”

“... lines of Sixtus V’s inscription above the door of the papal palace . . . way across Rome. They read it clearly as if to verify the perfect efficacy of the instrument . . . But still, as they all well knew, this would not satisfy their many opponents who believed that while it was good for the magnification of things on earth, the telescope was deceptive ...”

“... of the gap between the private man and his public role. But the comment does not imply that we now read the poems only as the work of a hypocrite. Thomas himself was uncomfortably aware that the moments of spiritual honesty he so wanted were liable to be staged by someone who was always unhappily aware of himself. In one of his best ...”

“... related to the theme of two more weighty studies, Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent and Peter Brown’s The Body and Society. This theme is human sexuality. Until very recently, almost all Christians assumed without question that this would have no place in the world to come, where ‘they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... of the genesis and evolution of the whole project and a series of hints as to how it should be read. Letters is about the relationship of the past and the future: about the inevitability of re-enacting the past and the possibility of learning from it and improving on it. It is as though John Barth had set out to answer, at the mid-point of his career, the ...”