“... 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 ...”

“... there is a better reason for not having a ballot, one which Scargill and the NUM general secretary Peter Heathfield (especially the latter) used constantly, but which is not to be found in these two books. It is the differential problem: that a ballot on an issue which affects all miners equally is a reasonable proposition, while a ballot which affects ...”

“... Graves or Larkin would not dare to sing their words or act out their stories: if persuaded to read their work in public, they were shy and halting. David Bowie is not shy in that way: in the crowded arenas he physically enacted his own creation, Ziggy Stardust, ‘the leper messiah’, in song and spectacle, and he evoked a certain pity and terror from ...”

“... utopias’, which includes Rowland Vaughan (1610), Gabriel Plattes’s Macaria (1641), Peter Chamberlen’s The Poore Mans Advocate (1649), Peter Cornelius Plockhoy (1659), John Bellers’s Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (1695), and two essays by an anonymous Hermeticist, Philadept, published in 1698 ...”

“... the European School played up to caricatures of their homelands. The French were moody: the boys read graphic novels and the girls wore Chanel. The Italians were appalled by the food and seemed to take badly to multilingualism (one Italian refused, out of a sense of patriotism, to speak any foreign language even though he had never lived in Italy). There ...”

“... remedy. Showing understandable irritation with self-styled Keynesians (‘who had usually read no more of Keynes than most Marxists had read of Marx’), he makes no bones about saying: ‘I abandoned Keynesianism in 1975.’ To call him a convert to ‘the monetarist mumbo-jumbo’, however, is merely a polemical ...”

“... all are doctrinaires, they are united not by doctrine, but by a mood. As a rule, it is better to read a man’s books than a book about his books, but anyone wishing to find out what distinguishes the New Right from the New or Old Left would be puzzled by the anthology of Roger Scruton’s squibs. It is evident what Professor Scruton does not like: the ...”

“... devoted precious years to such a task? It is difficult to believe that those who have actually read the book will not feel they have an adequate answer literally in their hands. For its author capitalises on the fact that the LSE is virtually unique – Imperial College is analogous in the natural sciences – among major British academic institutions. The ...”

“... of the officers, forks and glasses in hand, will seem less self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read van Alkemade or Schama and is aware of the importance of festival rituals in 17th-century culture. This example is very far from being the only one in which Schama juxtaposes the evidence of contemporary writers with that of artists. Indeed, abetted by his ...”

“... upward paths of a whole field of larks might have a shape like this. The oval marble fish can be read as the abstracted average of all things which slip through water – seal flippers, submarines and diving birds as well as fish. Nor is Brancusi’s smartness to be ignored. In the portraits (the most famous are of fashionable women) abstraction and ...”

“... her that … the true combat takes place elsewhere. It’s to hear this voice that she has read St Augustine her whole life, almost in secret’ – ‘almost in secret’ suggesting that she wasn’t quite sure who she wanted to be, or wanted to be seen to be, by herself in particular. Such choices, she would have found by reading Confessions, are ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”

“... Turgenev could be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness’, as Virginia Woolf put it ...”

“... that while the Sixties may have been exciting times to live through, they are hellish dull to read about. Shoe hitch-hiked through Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa. She was gang-raped in Morocco; she was in Holloway twice for drugs offences. She had a nest-egg from her hair-dressing days, but when she was really down and out – and once when she had a ...”

“... number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick. Not that all journalists have actually read Scoop. Once, many years ago, when I was immured in an un-newsworthy Latin American city at the insistence of my foreign editor, I tried to suggest that it was time to move on by sending him the immortal cable front Waugh’s novel: ‘Weather here lovely, no ...”