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“... send-ups of classical texts and mythological references to create droll, disorienting collages. Reading this early work was like being stoned in a taxi speeding through an unfamiliar city. The writings were disseminated as ‘mail art’, then distributed in chapbooks. She became the diminutive darling of a coterie of punk musicians, a few academic ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... were it not for the biographer looking over her shoulder. Almost as often, one finds oneself reading passages of straight reporting as if they were playing the tricks of a novel, using flatness to imply feeling, disguising as unruffled objectivity the chilled revulsion of a wife. For this is not, it must have leaked out by now, the traditional saint’s ...”

“... this kind of effect and those that are sought by Barry Cornwall in his ‘dramatic fragments’, a reading of which in French had given Pushkin his model. Very much in the spirit of the age, Cornwall had sought to wring every ounce of romantic melodrama out of the situations he treated. Pushkin does just the opposite: he arrests the mechanism of the melodrama ...”

“... the poem, as well as the Argo, is delayed by a long digresson on the origin of the Etesian winds. Peter Green, meanwhile, a historian of the Hellenistic world, has spent the best part of a decade producing his annotated translation and uses his excellent Introduction to zoom in on Apollonius’ use of the fantastic. All of them challenge the notion of the ...”

“... was tried out for the treatment of illness. The medical literature of those years makes horrifying reading today: paper after learned paper recounts the benefits of bleeding, cupping, violent purging, the raising of blisters by vesicant ointments, the immersion of the body in either ice water or intolerably hot water, endless lists of botanical extracts cooked ...”

“... his sister had had to settle for being the sister of the Messiah. I thought of David often in reading Jeffrey Masson’s My Father’s Guru. In the conclusion of Final Analysis (1990), his comic and indignant account of becoming and unbecoming a psychoanalyst, Masson dropped some hints about his peculiar childhood, explaining that he was naturally ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... from a single mind; the demands on vocabulary, and, less predictably, on syntax, that made the reading, for example, of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude such an enlarging experience. Translation upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise. A ...”

“... future historians come to write about the 1983 General Election, these two books will be essential reading. One is a thorough compilation of the evidence, and the other a brilliant line drawing of a maverick who streaked dramatically across the scene causing all heads to turn and significantly affecting the outcome. I recommend to the researcher of the year ...”

“... altarpieces, among them the ‘Assunta’ and the ‘Pesaro-Madonna’ for the Frari and the ‘St Peter Martyr’ for Zanipolo, without which the development of Baroque religious painting would be inconceivable. At the same time, he painted his celebrated mythologies for Alfonso d’Este (among them the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in London), a cycle for which ...”

“... University of Paris-VIII. Rancière emerged at the age of 25 as a co-author, with Althusser, of Reading ‘Capital’ (1965), but broke with him over the revolts of May 1968: Althusser took the Party line, accusing the participants of ‘infantile leftism’. For Rancière ‘the lesson of Althusser’ (the title of his 1969 critique of his former ...”

“... music he was listening to on the radio or on records or studying on scores. His more general reading was desultory and gives the editor little trouble. It is of interest, however, that he was, as a schoolboy, greatly taken with Henry James’s ‘impressive but terribly eerie’ story The Turn of the Screw. The presentation of the notes in this volume is ...”

“... fashion for therapy and esteem which it partially prefigures, and to the essentially Stalinist reading of history which allows that ‘mistakes were made’ but maintains that it was either everybody’s fault or nobody’s. I can only say, for myself, that I don’t remember Vietnam in this way at all. There were days when it was almost physically ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”