“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... blend of primatology and psychoanalysis, treating the penis as a transcendental signifier and reading the meanings of making love without reference to cultural conventions. A theory which claims to challenge universalising notions of sexuality depends on universalising interpretations of sex. As Simon Goldhill shows in his subtle and complex new ...”

“... first revolutionary work, when he had been ‘bold in my youth’ (audax iuuenta, oddly miscued by Peter Fallon as ‘still a callow youth’). Again, it is amazing that the poet who embarked on the Aeneid had seven or eight years earlier published a poem in which his desire to write an epic was suavely depreciated by Apollo, the god of poetry. At the ...”

“... proceedings and made a largely ineffectual attempt to tone them down. In the unlikely event of his reading this book, the staunchly Conservative Hugh will be amused by its reference to ‘the quibbling of those Liberals and Socialists who had had second thoughts on their return from Berlin’. The coolness which developed between Koestler and myself as the ...”

“... English prose? But Wilson’s virtues had their corresponding defects. Though his passion for reading and for language did not abate, he grew less receptive, a bit cranky even. His standards, schematically described in a piece called ‘The Literary Worker’s Polonius’ of 1935, were very exacting. He thought, quite rightly, that good reviewing was done ...”

“... out the intervening past? It would be nice to know in a variety of cases. This book is not easy reading; the syntax of the translation sticks very close to the original. Cambridge have cut out a fourth section containing documents. Some footnotes are pruned. Translations of translations are always a problem: in some cases we end up a fair way from the ...”

“... is witty about what the novelist can do with the psychiatrist – he can, for example, call him Peter Cleave, as McGrath does here. ‘And so on’ clinches the ludicrousness of the stages. But then McGrath has always been shrewd about the minor complicities that make a world, however mad; about the agreements that keep us sane. Anyone who talks like ...”

“... And he is forever boasting of his polished Euro-know-how, his multilingual communication skills. Peter Shreeve, who preceded David Pleat, was probably the sort of manager he would have wished Terry Venables to be, or to become: It was this reference to the French that was to produce a curious postscript. Peter Shreeve had ...”

“... rigorous inquiry akin to the biologists’ and findings stated as laws of cause and effect. In Peter Halfpenny’s catalogue of 12 referents for ‘positivism’ as used by sociologists, Durkheim is ticketed for two: ‘the natural science of sociology consists of the collection and statistical analysis of quantitative data about society,’ and ‘science ...”

“... make for poorer movies? There is one reliable cinematic pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of ...”

“... As narrative reward, her lost illusions are soon restored. It turns out that she was wrong in her reading of the previous day: the man she now knows she loves – Will Ladislaw – loves her and only her after all. But the window scene remains in a place of its own: a paused, breath-taking, momentary suspension of narrative development. Poised between the ...”

“... climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer’s epic that saw as its ‘point’ an explanation of Troy’s fall. The concept of a story is in essence a simple one, but that does not make all narrators either simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as ...”

“... when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less sanguine and noted ruefully that even good literature dates: ‘the majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human ...”

“... open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment. I wasn’t imagining it: the sound was coming from the Brandenburg Gate, where images from the fall of the Wall were being projected onto the façade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of reunification.Fresh ...”

“... to plug the gap it left behind.’ At the end of 1918 Teffi thought it prudent to embark on a reading tour of Kiev and Odessa, still both held by the Whites. She took two evening gowns and a bottle of perfume, thinking she would be back within a month, once things had settled down. At the frontier she and her group of writers and actors were held up in a ...”