“... the emissary of light who discovers the ancient darkness in himself – or in the less primitivist reading the novella also allows, discovers that within himself there is nothing at all, that he is entirely hollow, has no interior. His last words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ could refer to either condition, and to many other conditions as well. And if ...”

“... as in Eisenhower’s America, but dull nonetheless, not to mention smug. It is not surprising that Peter Hennessy should call his monumental history Having It So Good, nor that Dominic Sandbrook should call his equally monumental recent history of the late 1950s and early 1960s Never Had It So Good. This neatly illustrates the drawback of ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... plays such a large part in Lynch’s scheme; and why the film’s great set piece involves Watts reading for a part in a film. The same sense of deception and truth preying on each other governs the photography (by Peter Deming). We see pieces of a world or a person, corners of rooms, gardens full of ferns, characters ...”

“... that knows it’s not a biography but a picture. It looks wonderful – the cinematographer is Peter Suschitzky – but this only makes it feel more like a movie. The voices are a clue as well. Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley ...”

“... case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of the 1980s and 1990s, especially his 1982 masterpiece, The Plains. These are the works that have drawn comparisons to Borges ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical and ...”

“... companies. This heterogeneity is reflected in the variety of attitudes one finds when reading about the Underground, or when talking to people who use the escalators and to people who work with them. The ignorant but not unreasonably impatient public fails to see why heavy-duty escalators seem to behave less well than the household appliances they ...”

“... it, not for a new advance in painting, but by turning instead towards photography. Here his reading of Benjamin played a crucial role, but so did his growing recognition that photography presented a new challenge to the tradition of painting. Not only was it intrinsically realist: it had largely escaped the reach of the art market. Photographs could be ...”

“... fallen in love. The object of his love was the British Museum – or rather, the great circular reading room of the library (now renamed the British Library, stripped of all its grandeur and romance and moved to the Euston Road) that was then the hidden heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... up the consensus. Yet it was a growing popular consensus that the alternative, Private Eye-reading, TW3-watching, Holland Park-dwelling establishment deserved a turn on top, that gave Labour its 1964 victory, and Benn his first taste of office. This volume covers the strange episode two decades ago when Labour was not only electorally successful but ...”

“... Nor do readings of the past and divinations of the future of a particular life much resemble reading a poem or a story. There may be a passing resemblance to reading in the recollection and arrangement of personal disasters and pleasures now gone by, yet likely to have a foreseeable effect on the future. And musings of ...”

“... book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and ...”