“... 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 ...”

“... crowds in quisling Croatia; a fan magazine, heavily illustrated and printed in colour, was widely read in occupied France. Anne Frank slept in a bedroom adorned with photographs of the Third Reich movie star Heinz Rühmann (alongside Ray Milland and Deanna Durbin), and devoured the weekly Dutch film magazine, devoted largely to German releases, that the ...”

“... quip – ‘When I am dead, I hope it may be said:/”His sins were scarlet but his books were read”’ – prompts the thought that if he had committed any scarlet sins they would have been made public long ago. His elderly infatuation with Lady Juliet Duff, subject of many epigrams, was probably no more than that, and Pearce has nothing to say about ...”

“... of the new relationship’ of the Vatican with Castro, which Frei Betto particularly ought to read. Valladares is an ideological opponent of the regime: ‘let’s suppose that you people have achieved a standard of living higher than in any capitalist country, where everything exists in abundance. I would still be opposed to your system because my ...”

“... the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing the masterpieces which ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... several thousand pages. Perhaps this is as it should be; to call book history a theory would be to read it against the grain. For many literary critics a decade ago, the study of texts’ production, circulation, and material form provided a last refuge from Poststructuralism. The irony was that the former faces the questions most central to the latter: what ...”

“... Bible], exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, which Your Grace could read effortlessly, even without glasses. I learned from numerous witnesses that 158 copies have been completed, although some others say the number is 180. Of the quantity I am not entirely certain; of their completion (if one can have faith in informants) I have ...”

“... to broach the subject. Today, by contrast, a scarred identity earns almost universal respect. Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away reflects this shift. He used to be, he says, far too busy writing his philosophy to bother with his grandfather. It was only when he noticed an affinity between his work on ‘practical ethics’ and his maternal grandfather’s ...”

“... and history of The Third Man without going too far from a good library, there is plenty more to read: a continuity script (StudioCanal, 2015), a screenplay (Lorimer, 1973), Greene’s writings on film (The Pleasure Dome, Oxford, 1972; Mornings in the Dark, Carcanet, 1993), Brigitte Timmermann’s The Third Man’s Vienna (Shippen Rock, 2005), and Alexander ...”

“... and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).1 There are people who will only read Westerns or Crime and others who prefer not to read any book unless, like the works of Maya Angelou, it manages somehow to have a self-help tinge. (‘Self-Improvement’ is now, quite often, a section in your local ...”

“... killing me.’ The Education Secretary was, unsurprisingly, sharply criticised; not least by Peter Jones, a Spectator columnist, who told the BBC that ‘a calm, reasoned and balanced judgment would put it down to pig ignorance and blind prejudice’ – open-eyed prejudice being, I suppose, more to his taste. This is too harsh. What Clarke said was that ...”

“... on all men alike.’ Cubism, too, was warmed by this new sun.I suspect that Berger himself had read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist ...”

“... explanations lead to more questions. Have escalators always been so fragile? Can broken ones be read as a symptom of a deeper malaise? Are broken-down escalators evidence that we ask for the impossible: that to get the Tube to run smoothly is politically unfeasible because it would involve so many resources being taken away from the other good things we ...”