“... 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 ...”

“... her anxious friends. The days were yet to come of a doctor’s being quizzed by patients who had read the latest preposterously sanguine article in one or other digest magazine. Another consideration that worked for the doctor was that patients did get better – some of them, anyway – for ‘there are very few illnesses like rabies that kill all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stopped well short of what we should now glibly class as homosexual involvement.’ James would read his stories to gatherings of male friends, and the golden undergraduate McBryde drew pictures for the stories. ‘Monty disappeared into his bedroom,’ recalled another friend. ‘We sat and waited in the candlelight ... Monty emerged from the ...”

“... turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her ...”

“... the inquiry looked at 720 locations where polonium traces were found, heard from 62 witnesses and read through 5000 pages of evidence. Appendix 12 – not included in the published report – contained the evidence given behind closed doors under the Official Secrets Act. It presumably included evidence from Litvinenko’s handler at MI6, whom he used to meet ...”

“... property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn’t read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument ...”

“... Great Books, that Pale within which critics have comfortably nestled, is that you have to begin to read the obscure books and authors on whose behalf you have been campaigning. (Many of the weariest readers in scholarly libraries at present are feminist historical critics, busily finding the women’s writing to make an entire alternative canon.) Even within ...”

“... to reach beyond the confines of the possible or the acceptable. And yet, it’s one thing to read about animal-human sex in Yeats – ‘How can those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?’ – and another to think about, say, your neighbour getting down with Fluffy. Could he be? So what if he is? And what does ...”

“... Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns, well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward ...”

“... there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as ...”

“... writing, The Sense of an Ending is both extraordinarily lucid and strangely elusive. When I read it again recently, it often seemed like an extended response to a work to which it nowhere adverts – Eliot’s Four Quartets. This curious palimpsest was perhaps motivated by Kermode’s attempt to distance himself from Eliot while accepting the terms ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”