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“... up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the ...”

“... Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and ...”

“... In Politics and the Pound, Philip Stephens has produced a book which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn ...”

“... very angry if I am not. He told me that I could never accomplish anything important in life by my reading, while I could help him by being with him.’ Of course, he did not expect many men to match his intelligence, either. His time at Cambridge put him on terms with the great men of the period – McTaggart, Moore and his collaborator Whitehead – and he ...”

“... in which print triumphs over scribal culture have been eclipsed by a recognition of their overlap; Peter Stallybrass’s work on ‘printing-for-manuscript’ shows how popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone ‘that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or ...”

“... a strong sense of the impossibility, or at least the extreme difficulty, of writing a novel worth reading. This seems to be in part everyday fear of self-exposure, for which, in interviews, she tends to blame a hypercritical mother, and in part ambivalence about seeking a mass audience. On top of that, she has a nasty case of belatedness with regard to her ...”

“... 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me completely. This is the last straw. I’ve reported it to the ...”

“... in Christian belief, and this new book contains the chapter and verse of nearly a decade’s reading and musing. She attempts in it to trace the development of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and the changes in approach to the problems the doctrine set in train, from early days to the 14th century. She is able to delineate one strong curve ...”

“... in Suffolk on Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form ...”

“... of sophistication, perception, wittiness, up-to-the-momentness, will reduce our powers of novel-reading repartee, as it were, to helpless silence. But we are wrong, fortunately. Amis is the kindest of novel-talkers in that he does always, and very considerately, wait for us to catch up and make – at least notionally – our own little point. This is just ...”

“... There’s more dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of ...”

“... speeches, deciphered telegrams sent between commissars, newspaper reports, protocols and so on. Reading the Tsar and Tsarina’s correspondence and diaries is not like reading Nicholas and Alexandra. Alexandra is preoccupied with what reads now as cutesy spiritualism and neurotic moralism; she is at once high-minded and ...”

“... which still survived in the postwar Bethnal Green anthropologised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Davin’s respect for the resourcefulness, grit and loyalty of these working families is clear: the streets may have been mean but the locals weren’t. In all this the role of children was crucial. They ...”

“... with its provocative subtitle: ‘A Study of Music in Decline’. This was on my first Cambridge reading list, presumably because it wrote off a lot of the new music of the interwar years that Cambridge was still having difficulty coming to terms with in the early 1960s. But it was dangerous stuff for an 18-year-old brought up on the Anglican choral ...”

“... the language in which it is expressed had changed. You need to go back to contemporary texts, as Peter White did in his excellent Promised Verse (1993). The exact relationship of Horace, Maecenas and Augustus is quite tricky enough without having to read the details through a distorting lens. It might be worth adding that what are normally called the Odes ...”