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“... his peculiar talent and acquired his freshness and nimbleness of style. Certainly it was not by reading his favourite writer, Carlyle. His upbringing in Walsall and London was by no means a rollicking one. His father was a preacher turned coal prospector, who sank shafts in the wrong places and then, funds being exhausted, became an ironmonger in the East ...”

“... the rooster crowing, crickets, locusts, and frogs you hear at night down South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she ...”

“... myself if I had the flu. I am not a doctor, but there’s the internet and I’m still capable of reading, if not retaining, say, a juicy paper at Academia.edu: ‘Things Fall Apart: Heidegger on the Constancy and Finality of Death’ (by Taylor Carman), so how come I’ve remained so foggy about the details and possible trajectories of my cancer? I tell ...”

“... discourse to enter into the consciousness of Johnson and other characters) is his original reading of Johnson as capable of exploiting the contrast between his ‘appearance – shaking, twitching, pockmarked … and distinctly careless about his dress’ and his ‘remarkable powers of locution’. Nokes focuses throughout on Johnson’s ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... by association. Both biographies share an aversion to the twice-told tale (by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) of an Enlightenment Freud dutiful and dauntless in the stables of irrationality. The new biographers have turned away from prelapsarian universals. Rather than insulate his thought from its darker strains, they side emphatically with his fallibilistic ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... initiated by Suu Kyi, and obediently agreed by the NLD executive, has been just as unexpected. Peter Popham’s life of Aung San Suu Kyi is gripping, partisan and emotional, a welcome complement to the only other serious biography in English, Justin Wintle’s assiduously comprehensive Perfect Hostage. It contains fascinating new material and ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... today and the problems of assimilating or reducing unprecedented quantities of information. One reading will certainly not suffice. These are volumes for rereading and reference (and let us hope the indices are up to it, for there appear to be lacunae). Conveniently, Volume I appears first – an editorial achievement, for collaborative undertakings of this ...”

“... that words – can settle a social matter. That idea seems almost delusional today, but not when reading Brophy (her essays and criticism are ripe for republication).Despite her activism – she was a member of anti-vivisection and anti-bloodsports groups, the Free Thought Movement, the British Humanist Association, the Committee against Blasphemy Law and ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... While I was still reading these books, and thinking about them, I chanced to have two annoying near-KGB experiences. A creepy individual named Yuri Shvets published a book called Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest ...”

“... stilted or quaintly vague, that may be because we no longer know how to read him’. Before reading Wootten’s careful and illuminating analyses of the poems, I would probably have concurred with F.R. Leavis who, in 1932, dismissed de la Mare’s work as a ‘belated’ last throw of the romantic dice, offering the sort of ‘insidious ...”

“... all began to take on some credence once more. The last, especially, though a marginal theme of Peter Wright’s book (he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: Wilson was obviously a rotter), rocked people’s trust in MI5. That could be taken to justify the secret services’ strategy all along. Any publicity would inspire paranoia, which they ...”