“... and his own guilt-stained history with Alma. Desmond, Laura’s second husband, and Peter, the editor who both loves and is terrorised by his favourite writer, maintain an uneasy comradeship. Once again we are inside a social world on the brink of disintegration. This time, though, Fox seems far more sanguine about the splintering. Laura may be ...”

“... have produced a book which is not only even more up-to-date than the rest but a real pleasure to read. Just what a revolution in Viking studies these books achieve and represent is clearly, if unintentionally, revealed by the reissue of Johannes Bronsted’s The Vikings, which was first published in Danish in 1960, and appeared posthumously in English five ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... despair. It is possible, with practice, to learn to hear contrapuntal music, especially if you can read music and follow a score. Then you will see as well as hear how, for instance, in the first fugue of the ‘48’, one of the 16 fugues that Kerman analyses in some detail, the first seven notes of the subject are inverted – turned upside down – in two ...”

“... a human link between the two adventurers, and rather more to the story. Another old Himalaya hand, Peter Steele, now tells it well, and puts right a longstanding injustice. Toiling up mountains for sport is, beyond any doubt, a British invention. People who live among mountains – the Sherpas of Nepal, for instance – can see no sense in it. Mountain ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... reproduction of the Elizabethan attitudes their characters articulate.I admit that when I first read Romeo and Juliet I found Romeo’s image pleasingly glamorous rather than potentially offensive: the bejewelled Ethiope, whether male or female, seemed to be offering an alternative style of beauty with which Juliet’s, and the night’s, might excitingly ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... profound!’ and ‘what nonsense!’ we think at one and the same time, just as we do when we read Blake’s own annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses or Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels. What you shouldn’t do is begin your biography with a paragraph like this: William Blake, poet and artist, is one of the most important and controversial ...”

“... is that the strategy would tell us nothing about how Hogarth’s pictures were intended to be read, only about how they might perhaps have been read. For Paulson, however, it is a strategy that offers immediate access to a subtext whose meanings are fully intended by the artist. ‘The popular or ...”

“... in keeping with the man he has become 30 years later when he writes this memoir. Hanna likes being read to, and Michael reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our ...”

“... among them) to the political and cultural circumstances of 1621,1 since nowadays these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed ...”

“... encountered Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. One wag (I still regret it wasn’t me) put up his hand and said: ‘Sir, if Orwell just scrambled the digits in 1948 to get 1984, can I call my dystopia “1977”?’ Most people of my generation ...”

“... who writes rather thoughtful spy stories told me it was the best book about espionage he had ever read. It is a history of the CIA through the life of Richard Helms, who was director from 1966 to 1973. Much of Powers’s information comes from the spies themselves, and while it is a great achievement to persuade such men to speak, they are masters of what ...”