“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... particularly impressed by the density of Schoenberg’s writing, and told his wife after he’d read the score that it made him feel old. He wasn’t the only one to notice Schoenberg’s potential. The educational reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald invited him, on his return to Vienna, to hold composition classes at her school. By 1905, the school had become a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ranks of Freud’s experimental practice. Perhaps, as Maddox proposes, he felt vindicated when he read Freud, who had abandoned his seduction theory in 1897 and now argued that most accusations of childhood sexual abuse were fantasies. Because few people believed in psychoanalysis, it could be conducted only in situations which left the analyst open to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists say about us.’ That summed it up: all this time we Brits thought we were talking to ourselves, and we were, but everyone else was listening in. Belgians are not ...”

“... not to theory but to principles that they decline to pursue things through volumes. The work of Donald Davie, for instance (the best critic of the post Eliot-Leavis-Empson world), neither practises nor advocates literary theory; its hard thinking is resolutely unelaborated beyond the exposition and application of principles. Hartman praises highly Purity of ...”

“... Carl Dennis, ‘World History’1 The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and ...”

“... more than 11,000 accounts for spreading Covid misinformation and had ‘permanently suspended’ Donald Trump’s account for violating the company’s ‘Glorification of Violence’ policy. With Isaacson tagging along, Musk went out to dinner with four of his oldest kids, all in their teens, who were ‘puzzled’ by the purchase: it didn’t make sense to ...”

“... stated as heard in the present, already over. Knowlson, who quotes this passage from a letter to Donald Mc Whinnie, draws no lesson from it, other than the somewhat limp, and question-begging, suggestion that the world of How It Is is ‘related sometimes closely but rarely unambiguously to Beckett’s own life’. Certainly all possibility of a lesson ...”

“... grew up in a stable middle-class home: his father was a hard-working dentist, a cultured and well-read man active in local politics; Miles attended Juilliard with a generous weekly allowance from Pops (enough, indeed, to help support an indigent Charlie Parker), and later hung out with writers and artists in postwar Paris. Consequently, some readers of ...”

“... down – is in part responsible for his widespread neglect. Even so broad-minded and widely-read a philosopher as Arthur Danto has said that he finds Dewey’s work without interest, because lacking in ‘structure’. Ayer found (and, I imagine, Williams finds) in Dewey only a rubbery amorphous mass of neologisms (‘problematic ...”

“... physical and the spiritual. ‘Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy,’ we read of a rare ‘good’ Murdoch character meditating the accusation of paedophilia a child has just levelled against him: ‘He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, schoolmasters, girls seen on ...”