“... scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War Two. For most visitors, though, as Barnett observes, contact with Lhasa’s inhabitants was slight, the language barrier was high and, in ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... exhibition (until 25 January), I wandered into the café to take the weight off my feet and to read the reviews I had downloaded from the exhibition website on my tablet. I had been careful not to read them until after my visit, but now I wanted to see if I could use them to get me started on my own review. The first one ...”

“... have never met Skelton, but I know some of the people in her book who have and who, what’s more, read the London Review of Books. This is inhibiting: like reviewing a paper on DNA for Nature when one has never encountered a double helix. Still, I do have one thing in common with Skelton. She says that Erich von Stroheim was her ideal. Mine too, and what is ...”

“... Russian novelists, the only things that have ever really caught on – when there is so much to be read in English? Increasingly, it’s only English that counts, not only in England and other English-speaking territories, but globally. Scores of English books get translated every year into every language under the sun – thereby wrecking the indigenous ...”

“... 2000 that he or she start with Militant, to get properly into the mood. It is a compellingly good read, and what is more, as far as one can tell, a model of fair and unbiased reporting. The weightier volume, with its tables and statistics and psephological analyses, will be for the long days in the library that follow. It is sobering to realise that that ...”

“... acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were taped and then edited. They all read fluently and they all read the same, except for one or two by inmates of Rikers Island which are dubbed into a kind of prison-movie vernacular. Some of the respondents have sensibly chosen to have pseudonyms. The rest are ...”

“... want to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, which is set on the Titanic during the four days before she sank, and narrated in the first person by a survivor whose first and only name is Morgan. The title, Every Man for Himself, suggests that human selfishness is going ...”

“... and imperishable, which one might label “God”.’ This tilt makes the book a curious one to read for much of the time, at least for this reader, inclined to believe that the supposed deep question is not a question at all, but an imposing phantom cast up by certain habits of mind. Holt quotes plenty of people who feel this way; he knows that worrying ...”

“... Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering ...”

“... Miller had written an article for the college literary magazine and Auden expressed a desire to read it. Twenty years later, when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Auden’s desires were still being expressed in the same guileless way: undergraduate poets asked round to read him their verse in the hope that one thing ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... into Ararat. Even so, the majority of readers who don’t have Pushkin at their fingertips must read the sequence with a nagging sense of cultural inferiority. (‘Idiot Brits’ is a phrase Thomas likes to throw around.) Over the years of the quintet, readers and reviewers have turned against Thomas in droves – on both sides of the Atlantic. Having ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... biography, and I would urge anybody who likes a bit of Richard II with their morning coffee to read the last two hundred pages straightaway. Thatcher’s downfall, we know, was a coup de théâtre if ever there was one, but the book is also very telling about the duplicity of certain friends and the trauma of lost power. Thatcher is distraught from the ...”