“... and of the Norreys family who lived there. I leave it open on a chair hoping that Rupert will read it, Rycote Church being one of his favourite places. Also open on another chair is Richard Hoggart’s Promises to Keep, in which among other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 ...”

“... volunteers. Also Plaza Hotel employees, priests, rabbis and psychotherapists. During lulls I would read from one of four cork boards, which displayed handwritten notes to lost family members, phone numbers of people who had extra beds in their homes, a safe list, locations and times of numerous memorial services, an announcement stating that this was the last ...”

“... a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or ...”

“... up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s books to have been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul ...”

“... heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the ...”

“... but also temperamentally, as one keeps being brought up against one’s failures – failure to read the books for a start, but also failure to turn them to any other advantage. There are loads of books about Housman, for instance, on which I once thought to base a play, and all the books on Kafka which, though I did write two plays about him, still seem a ...”

“... of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read about his career step by step you realise how little his perspective ever widened to become international in scope. At the end of a century in which Britain fought seven wars with France, he was interested almost exclusively in the way French tendencies ...”

“... time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the dissidents met now and then to read their work and shout down the official festival. The group adopted the name Workers’ City – which spelled out their opposition to that recently developed area around Blackfriars and Ingram Street known as Merchant City – and set about picketing some ...”

“... of agrarian protest is continued in two new contributions to the lively debate on the Land League. Donald Jorden joins in a key issue of that debate – the nature and limitations of the class alliance involved in what is another local study (despite its title), of Mayo. His economic/demographic analysis of the county in core-periphery terms is impressive, as ...”

“... she has her own mystical idea of the creative self, wanting at one point to ‘nip upstairs and read all I have written’ in order ‘to confirm that I am I. I.’ This is something like accepting her own divinity, even if it is only a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation. At any rate it anticipates Patrick White’s admission at ...”

“... sum: you might think from the extensive praising reviews of this book that you needn’t actually read it, because it would seem to be the kind of book that reviews can sufficiently gut and précis and anthologise for you, but you would be wrong, since much of what gives the book its patient power – its balance and sustenance of alternate tones and of ...”

“... to be a language,’ Johns noted in the early 1960s – or, more precisely, a language game. He read Wittgenstein in the summer of 1961, Philosophical Investigations in particular, but already by 1959 he had let colours and names slip away from one another, and in 1960 he superimposed numbers, 0 through 9, to the point of illegibility. With Fool’s House ...”

“... are highly classified CIA National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), which he has been able to read in censored form in the National Archives, or through successful requests using the Freedom of Information Act. He does not go into detail on how he achieved this or where these documents can be found by other researchers today, but thanks to the FOIA, he ...”

“... her contact with the Surrealists in prewar Paris. Once in America, she became an extremely well-read and hard-working analytic patient. Her full analysis with Lowenfeld lasted from 1952 to 1967; after that, she remained in touch with him and had two further intensive but brief periods of therapy. After Lowenfeld’s death in 1985, she continued a ...”

“... coined to designate this xenophobia. When I asked the interpreter on my first trip whether he had read any Marx or Engels or Lenin, he looked puzzled. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everything is interpreted by Comrade Kim Il-sung.’ He wasn’t sure whether any of the classic texts were available in libraries. At one stage it appeared that the United States was ...”