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“... In one of John Berryman’s more lucid dream songs (No. 364), there is amusing reference to the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings ...”

“... debonair correspondent who emerges from Letters and Documents. This volume makes fascinating reading, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard the man will find it impossible to put down. This is not only the first good translation of a certain part of Kierkegaard’s work, it is also the first. The original collection was put out by Professor Niels ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the belief that Hitler has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some ...”

“... he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of 1953? ‘Oh, the election! Never has anything been so hysterically funny.’ (Never?) In 1967, reading about the increased number of coloured immigrants to ...”

“... minutes. It was Anita Brookner’s novel Look at me. The sight of a man sitting on his own and reading a book must have struck the lady as in some way peculiar and worthy of investigation, for she descended from her dais and gracefully approached the little table. ‘I see you are very, very deep in that book,’ she said, giggling gently. ‘I expect it ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... isn’t mistaken, for Dante himself undergoes an intense viva on the Christian virtues by Saints Peter, James and John. Beatrice begins one typical lesson by saying ‘secondo mio infallibile avviso’ (‘in my infallible opinion’) but her teaching is not only administered with smiles: she puts on a whole firework display of inner glowing. The words for ...”

“... to be true. Valladares has quite enough to indict him for without that charge. Both Tad Szulc and Peter Bourne seem to have approached the test of writing about Castro with initial enthusiasm, and in both cases the enthusiasm seems to have flagged. Both books dwell disproportionately on Castro’s life up to his taking of power, and have disappointingly ...”

“... powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity ...”

“... read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was meant to be making money for his grandmother’s bakery (‘Once I believe that I had got near two Shillings together, which I hid in the ...”

“... been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night. 3 May. I am reading Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World. It’s very good, even overcoming my (A.L. Rowse generated) prejudice against reading about Shakespeare. I hadn’t realised at Richard Griffiths’s funeral in ...”

“... sustained poem ‘The Most Difficult Position’, republished in Selected Poems: 1954-1982. Reading it and others there, I wondered with which idea of the game Fuller’s work shows more affinity. Fuller, who has published a useful critical work on W.H. Auden, is an inheritor of the poet’s later attitude to the art. When, in his English phase, Auden ...”

“... more than their due). The abstraction of economic man was no longer needed when a judicious reading of history could produce his clone. By the time of Marshall, Political Science had achieved its place in the syllabus at Cambridge – one of the high points in any triumphalist account. When the great Maitland was dining as a guest at Trinity Hall, the ...”

“... signalled Bonn speech came a mere six months into that premiership. What is remarkable, in reading this full and fairly sympathetic biography of Major, is how soon the note changes from one of optimism, celebration of the rise to power, and hope of constructive achievements, to one of fatalism, extenuation and despair. Even Major’s surprise victory ...”