“... self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has read widely and deeply in Hegel – not for some of us ...”

“... in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels ...”

“... in the game of discrimination; all his friends were rung at one time or another to have a sentence read out for criticism or confirmation. Any visit to his house was likely to involve a discussion about the placing of a sculpture or just how high on the wall a tapestry should hang. He loved arguing about who was the greatest this or that – he was passionate ...”

“... the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides ...”

“... and indulgent of a few quite particular locales and their architectural attractions. It has always read as if it would rather be titled A Guide to the Architecture of NW1. The structural approach that Jones and Woodward take in dividing up London is almost comic in its refusal to accommodate the city’s districts as they are actually experienced and lived ...”

“... He thinks that literature itself – rather than theories about it – is our best guide to how to read critically, and he has devoted the better part of a long career to this conviction. Kermode is a working critic and proud of it. When he does turn to the sustained consideration of questions of theory and method, it is almost always in the interest of ...”

“... To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence ...”

“... interviews. At their press conferences, questions have to be submitted in advance; the answers are read from a script. Relations with the media, as all other aspects of their lives, are regulated by the Imperial Household Agency, a conservative organisation staffed largely by bureaucrats of mediocre ability and well-developed arrogance. But the senior ...”

“... on the Elector of Saxony (and, presumably, Frederick the flautist), insisting that we ought to ‘read’ the B minor Mass not only for its ‘astonishing demonstration of piety and invention’ but as an instance of this crawling servility: ‘the awe we feel in the Credo ... reinforces the separation between ruler and ruled, and this in turn is made to feel ...”

“... and the Lords of Karma, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians and Atlanteans. Theosophists did not read this part, but were attracted by the society’s benign general aims of uniting religions and promoting brotherhood. As Theosophy prospered and spread, two important cults diverged from the main stream. In 1913, the German branch, led by Rudolf ...”

“... received by ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’. But ‘Modern Fiction’ is rarely read in context. On either side of it in The Common Reader, like the cladding on a nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for ...”

“... of your editor and referees, and when you answered the copy editor’s queries, and when you read the proofs. As you collect references across the span of your book, you are sure to find mistakes and inconsistencies. They are not only irritating: they provoke anxiety. Can they still be put right? It’s a race against the printer’s schedule. Yet if you ...”

“... into elegant but on the whole unoriginal digests. As the project progressed, and Montaigne read and wrote and relaxed into the therapy of writing, these five-finger exercises became something much greater. The later essays move beyond the simple juxtaposition of authorities, not only to wonder about the foundations of human knowledge, but to display a ...”

“... in Ecuador. Later he worked in Chile, where he set up technical schools, teaching his pupils to read and write, and then showing them how to make bricks, tiles and candles. He is remembered in Chile for appearing naked in anatomy classes – there were no spare corpses. He eventually returned to Ecuador, to the small town of Latacunga, and died there in ...”

“... sketch reveals, existed as a collegium for the new humanism. More taught his children to read Greek and Latin by affixing letters to an archery-board and encouraging his pupils to fire arrows at them. The prosecutor of later years could bear to chastise his children only with a peacock-feather. He and his wife, Alice, played the lute together, like ...”