“... 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 ...”

“... at the door of the nation-state seems in the end a desperate and even a disingenuous one. Anyone reading The Block Man’s Burden without prior knowledge of Africa might be excused for thinking that tyranny began in that continent around the year 1970, when its new rulers began to succumb to the strains of operating within the unfamiliar institutions which ...”

“... possessive father Gerald – who played Captain Hook/Mr Darling on the stage and passed on a dire Peter-Panishness to her – were the now forgotten bestsellers of a man who spoke to the anxieties of the 1890s. Peter Ibbetson (1891) was an earlier Peter Pan, the fantasy of a cloudless ...”

“... with our own barrack room; and I was allowed to keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly ...”

“... he shook such megrims off and his characteristic ‘Johnsonian common sense’ broke through. Reading the Memoir gives tantalisingly little enlightenment as to how such tortured works as Maud or In Memoriam came to be. But Hallam Tennyson is the source for almost all the illustrative anecdotes and biographical narrative which subsequent writers are ...”

“... with melancholy eyes – to be hung they told me in three weeks – spending that interval in reading novels, a bad preparation for facing either God or Nothing. With hindsight, it is easy to regard this flip moment from a letter to Helena Sickert as one of those luminous recognitions in which a writer discovers both a subject and a proleptic image that ...”

“... boy’s sights; he dragged him out of technical draughtsmanship and towards architecture, set him reading, furnished him with an English Arts and Crafts vision tempered to the Suisse Romande, put him on the road to Italy and Vienna, and got him his first, collaborative commissions. After a decade of guidance and generosity came the inevitable quarrel and ...”

“... This new urbanity contrasts with the ‘reptilian indifference to one another’ (Walsh quotes Peter Hill’s memorable phrase) of the instrumental lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring. The symphony’s finale, ‘with its dazzling fugal and imitative exchanges, breathes a refinement that civilises the ferocity, without in any way drawing its ...”

“... a couple of times, briefly and inconsequentially. The second meeting was awkward. I’d given a reading at Cornell the evening before. Creeley was in the audience with his third wife, Penelope, who was doing a graduate degree there in environmental landscape design. A.R. Ammons, for many years the éminence grise at the school, asked me to visit his office ...”

“... and mental universes’. Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object: part of the power of the Book of Kells or ...”

“... intervals, then: ‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the News and this is Alvar Lidell reading it’ – a voice like God, from far-off London. My mother frowned as she listened, while I wriggled around to peer inside the set through the ventilation holes in its fibreboard back. The valves glowed and flickered like a miniature city in the ...”

“... and the arrival of magnates like Newnes, Pearson and Harmsworth progress took an opposite turn. ‘Reading for the Millions’ became big business. The proprietors got to know their public very well, and the market was profitably carved into a patchwork of target areas with competition driving standards down rather than up. It was George Orwell who went beyond ...”

“... of the harbour at Belle-Ile, broadly painted in bright colours, marks the influence of John Peter Russell, the Australian artist, who’d been a friend of Van Gogh. At the end of that year Matisse painted The Dinner Table – quite big, more than three feet by four – a late Impressionist interior, innocuous enough one might think, yet the first in a ...”

“... in Philadelphia, in darkest Australia and here in Ireland. A poem was a pure, timeless object; reading did not require a cultural context. In History, the physical force tradition in Ireland was never dealt with directly. In three years, there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his ...”

“... what MacNeice’s Latin tag is saying. Of Eliot: ‘So we got hold of Eliot and, though at a first reading he seemed unheard-of heavy going, we sensed straight away that he filled the bill.’ ‘Sensed’, indeed. Of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘At a first reading I saw no form in it and, with the exception ...”