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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage that he is still widely read. Penguin keeps all the novels in print, though none of the biographies. Reluctant to give all the details, they allow that Decline and Fall is the top seller at about 25,000 a year, The Loved One a surprising second, Brideshead Revisited doing nicely at ...”

“... assassination is the most visually documented operation in the history of espionage. No need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association – you can’t, as a warmly sympathetic biographer of Freud, do-better than that. The sheer amount of biographical, historical and psychoanalytical detail that has gone into the making of this Life is, as far as I can see, unparalleled in the literature of its subject; and so are the care and informed intelligence with which this stupendous mass of facts, conjectures and speculations has been sifted, as well as the attractive, good-humoured and unstrenuous way most of it has been presented ...”

“... Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does ...”

“... of 1952-3. McEwen quotes Moore saying that the subject owed something to the bedtime stories he read to his daughter. Their majesties look like survivors of a distant age, an effect enhanced by the fact that they recall the lean, tense warriors of archaic Greek and Etruscan sculpture which was cast in bronze directly from small wax models, as well as the ...”

“... nature and his daughter’s very method of fiction. Not surprisingly, Woolf disclaimed having read her father’s works. But, as Beer puts it, ‘her earlier familiarity with his work had taken the form of dipping, scanning, listening, a flighty and intrigued resistance which allows rereading and pillaging and avoids immersion.’ Actually, the argument ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... can learn how sheets were folded, and even how to make sketchbooks of our own: shades here of Blue Peter. One such chapter introduces pleasant distinctions between ‘sketchbooks with a regular structure and professional stiching’, ‘sketchbooks with a regular structure and non-professional stiching’, and ‘sketchbooks with both irregular structure and ...”

“... set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point of view, though Peter Ho Davies tacitly takes the nationalist line – at Penrhos. Arthur drinks on the other side of the pub from the English soldiers, in the Welsh-speaking public bar. His daughter doesn’t share his politics: she’s ‘proud of her Welshness’ but ...”

“... are erudite and caustic: a sting in the tail of this sometimes bland collection. Certainly, Peter Gay should read Lloyd-Jones whenever he feels a fit of hyperbole stealing over him. ‘The astonishing range of Freud’s discoveries, his unparalleled gift for reading evidence’, ‘advocate of genius’, ‘this ...”

“... essays on Plato and Heidegger, among others – this impression rapidly fades once one begins to read some of the other books he wrote. The two best known of these, co-written with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, are not easy to categorise: they range from psychoanalysis and the culture of therapy to linguistics and the concept of ...”