“... fiction and non-fiction simply cannot be consistently maintained. All texts, then, when closely read, reveal that it is impossible ever to state the facts as they really are. The view of the world contained in every text includes the view that it cannot be a fully accurate view of the world. All texts, ...”

“... possession of properties that have a particular relation to one’s own properties’. I have read and reread these definitions without getting much light on the second one. It is not just that I find sociological prose cloying, but that I have a nasty suspicion that this book is trying to measure the disappearance of something visible only to the eye of ...”

“... on the Treasury bench, and he records numerous attendances of over nine. Yet he somehow managed to read voraciously a multitude of books on subjects which had nothing to do with politics and to correspond with scholars and theologians all over Europe. When the Gladstone Diaries and the Disraeli Letters have appeared in full the historian will have the material ...”

“... can’t be said for David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, which can be read either as a fan letter or as the longest liner notes in history. In his preface, Yaffe tells of being ‘bitched out’ by Mitchell years ago for describing her Beverly Hills home as ‘middle-class’ in a New York Times piece. ‘I don’t know what you ...”

“... delicate souls quaveringly sensitive to those around them) that means they can write letters which read as though there isn’t a real human being at the receiving end of them. Spark’s final parenthesis, which says that Barnsley’s ‘excellent’ novels are heavy-handed (he wrote under the pseudonym Gabriel Fielding, since he was distantly related to Henry ...”

“... wrote on his platform, ‘talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.’ Donald Trump agreed, and on 14 March placed its employees on administrative leave. Reporters without Borders, VOA and union members filed a lawsuit, and on 22 April Judge Royce Lamberth, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, instructed that the broadcasts be ...”

“... novel is called in an act of homage to Supertramp, sets its tone effectively before we start to read with an evocative jacket illustration. Pink clouds portending passion and doom mass over a pleasantly green West Riding landscape, while a man and a woman, with their backs turned, contemplate the view over a workmanlike stretch of dry-stonewalling. It seems ...”

“... tiny but affecting mutual spark of deeply human recognition? Not all that long, unless you have to read through it. In his manifesto of enthusiasm for Zola’s notebook tactics and shoe-leather research (the sort of ‘research’ that he himself so laboriously demonstrates in the agonising White-Jordan dialogue above), Wolfe did not find room to recommend ...”

“... wedding – no minor character or plot line is left unturned. Austenians not only buy and read these books, they maintain a lively conversation, in person and online, about sequels, continuations, adaptations and completions. ‘The sequel,’ Gérard Genette wrote in Palimpsests, ‘differs from a continuation in that it continues a work not in order ...”

“... Treatise and the Ethics. Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by ...”

“... a clever bugger but he can’t sing.’ Coward blamed the microphone for making him sound like Donald Duck and the humidity for putting his piano out of tune. But as the tour went on he got into his stride and the reception improved. The conditions did not. He slept in bamboo huts, keeping one eye out for snakes, witnessed the rudimentary medical care ...”

“... contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ...”

“... them? The ‘few bad apples’ theory was widely discredited from its very first utterance by Donald Rumsfeld, so it is disheartening to see it replicated in some of the statements still coming from the MoD. But at the other extreme, the idea that a coherent mandate condoning torture runs all the way along the chain of command is also hard to credit, if ...”

“... advised rulers such as Dionysius of Syracuse. Then there’s the question of who’s meant to read prescriptive political philosophy that eschews a prescriptive political role for philosophers. Beside the stuff that pleases modern left secularists, such as Utopians’ communal property and their cautious attitude to war, there are some things they care ...”

“... Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to the duplicity was shock: ‘My relationship with my father was in ruins. I had ...”