“... German: after some years I received a cheque for about £4.) I was surprised, a few days ago, to read somewhere a description of myself as ‘a heavily subsidised author’. Don’t almost all authors subsidise their writing by doing other jobs? Actually (and I don’t care if it sounds like boasting), I no longer have to subsidise my writing, which does ...”

“... of freedom under the communists. It is also true that Teilhard de Chardin is a rather easier read than Dobzhansky and that Husserl, Lyotard and Lévi-Strauss have had the advantage of a good introduction, represented as they are by influential and eloquent Czech followers. Among 67 non-fiction books released in Prague and recently listed in a literary ...”

“... surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival ...”

“... soon after the completion of the second volume. The outrage felt by everyone who had known or read him had something to do with his youth, but more to do with the cutting-off of his gifts. These included an almost superhuman capacity for tracking, retrieving, devouring and assimilating information in less time and from more sources than was previously ...”

“... is uncharacteristic, a flicker of hesitation such as Leavis does not usually allow himself. Read the chapter on Hard Times and you discover why he loved this, the most tendentious and merely emblematic of all Dickens’s novels. He dwells at length on the practice of Gradgrind in the classroom and the dire consequences of his supposedly utilitarian ...”

“... When I was 12, I read a story by J.G. Ballard about a boy who has lived all his life in a vast city. One day, he decides to take a train out of the metropolis, to find a wide open space where he can fly a kite. But after many days on the train, he starts to recognise landmarks from the window that he has seen earlier in the journey: he has travelled all the way around the world without leaving the city ...”

“... have been perfectly obvious to any English person during the centuries for which the work has been read. In any case, the present exhaustive survey by Peter Field has surely put paid to the Matthew thesis, the Kittredge denial and the Lewis exculpation all together: it is no longer possible to say, in chorus or ...”

“... to become. His mother, a Freudian and a socialist, used to give him 25 cents for each book he read and reported on; he connects her driving ambition for him with the lack of a family tree. ‘We sprang like Minervas from the ghetto brow, barely knowing our grandparents, our great-grandparents lost in the great Russian miasma.’ Schulberg’s maternal ...”

“... knowledge ‘not worth a button’. In Philadelphia, William Cobbett, under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, launched biting satires on the eminent exile’s garbled style and dangerous beliefs. In London, Johnson was long convinced of Priestley’s badness: ‘an evil man, sir, his work unsettles everything yet settles nothing’. Boswell helpfully ...”

“... believed, as most German doctors and many of their British colleagues apparently did, that, in Peter Barham’s words, ‘the so-called war neuroses were for the most part not causally connected with the circumstances of the war at all, but were essentially psychological reactions in terrified and weak-willed individuals unwilling or unable to place the ...”

“... Trotsky would lecture on his relationship to dialectical materialism, while Lenin, who read his chemistry textbook as a student, would encourage Mendeleev’s daughter to finish a laudatory biography of the nation’s hero. As a historian of Romanov science and politics, Gordin persuasively reads the writing table’s fate at Blok’s hands as a ...”

“... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the personal empathy and enthusiasm ...”

“... to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to ...”

“... being prone to clowning and lavatory humour. Think of the babyish and buffoonish Amadeus of Peter Shaffer’s play. Or the impetuous, tousle-haired and disconcertingly North American figure in the Milos Forman film, stalked through the Vienna night by Antonio Salieri to the sound of the Dies irae from the Requiem. Franz Niemetschek, Mozart’s ...”

“... In summer​ 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a revolutionary secret society ...”