“... of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide. Such a resurgence may have a socio-political motive: at a time when the Government is imposing ‘centrality’, dialect is a way of fighting local corners, a way for the regions to remind the capital ...”

“... How many books have I read? Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred …? I could compile a list. But what would it tell me? What I know? What I have forgotten? What I was? What I wanted to be? What my mother and father wanted and expected and expect me to be? Millions of Cats, Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale, Where the wild things are, The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Stuart Little, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers, The Little Prince, Member of the Wedding, Gigi, Lord of the Flies, Return of the Native … This is Willa, the 15-year-old narrator of Early Disorder, looking at her bookshelf and wondering if you are what you read ...”

“... woodcuts, engravings by Dürer, Ricketts and Pissarro. Above the fireplace are shelves of well-read books – apparently quite extraordinary books to judge by the title. Madam is very sweet, yet very cultured. Pissarro, hidden behind his beard and thick eyebrows, sat there enjoying everything so heartily and yet so quietly. There is something French in ...”

“... piece of film holds more information: you may, for example, be able to take a magnifying glass and read titles on the spines of books which would be too far away were you standing where the camera stood. Records of rooms and buildings made before miniature cameras became commonplace can have a preternatural sharpness. Thirty-five millimetre reportage, when it ...”

“... early ones anyway – are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz.* The general effect of the show is cool and spacious. You could be in a fashion store which has decided to go retro and jazz up the decor. To see more than decorative wit you must ...”

“... women, The women who ripped the oxen to get the bone-harrows To reduce the poet. Decorous it is to read From between the skins of calves The stories of the deaths of poets. My roach crackles in my hand. This is where they left his face Hanging in this bush; now the world Will look at us with his face always; this line Of hedge, this singing tree, this furrowed ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... to a flattened existence.The reader first glimpses Ivan through the eyes of his older brother, Peter. ‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad,’ the novel begins, eavesdropping on Peter’s internal monologue, ‘That suit at the funeral.’ Peter, a human rights barrister, is ten ...”

“... was to a degree calculated. Sickert began life as an actor and sometimes the easiest way to read his work is to think of the painter as a cool intellect calculating spontaneous effects. In his writing he is always interesting about the practice of painting. In a letter to the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche he described his ideal method of working on the ...”

“... fills the middle distance. Shore details – jetty, waterfowl, boats – mark the foreground but read as being hundreds of yards away. Taken together, the three pictures can be thought of as a study of the way light modulates a view, at morning and evening. The Red Rigi shows the setting sun still shining on the upper slopes of the mountain. In The Blue Rigi ...”

“... 1822. They encourage you to jostle your way to the front, to get close enough to the canvas to read gestures, textures and expressions. It was not just popularity that made it necessary to rope off Chelsea Pensioners, receiving the London Gazette extraordinary of Thursday, June 22nd 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo!!! when it was shown in the Royal ...”

“... among the most elaborate of Gillray’s prints and the most demanding for modern readers – for read as well as look at them you must.Altogether, there are many references to absorb. Take the stage shown in Titianus Redivivus. Crowded with painters, it is centred on the distant view of Miss Provis at her easel, her peacock train supported by naked ...”

“... what they are. The total effect is generous – whole walls with only a few sentences to be read – neat and rather bland.Walking is a kind of sport and some of Fulton’s gallery art is to his walking art what any sports report is to the event. Walking can also be a personal exploration, even the kind of walk that is merely a pacing up and down, and ...”

“... with chagrin that I failed to fulfil the forecast of my youth.’ There is more than one way to read this anecdote, first told by Holman Hunt. Hunt, Millais’s lifelong friend, was the member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who best kept the faith; loyalty to the cause could have encouraged him to make a confession of failure out of a piece of ...”

“... Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘Arthur’. Rogers, who was a dyslexic and could hardly read before he was 11, who even now finds that ‘ordered prose in the smallest quantities can take him hours and dozens of rewrites,’ who ‘seems never to have had a mother tongue’, who drew so badly that he was nearly failed in his early years at the AA ...”