“... city. For some, it has been almost synonymous with modern, indeed with capitalist society. Michael Peter Smith reminds us, in his book on The City and Social Theory, of the urban concerns of Louis Wirth, Georg Simmel, Theodor Roszak and Richard Sennet. (For some strange reason, Smith adds Sigmund Freud to the list, but this merely shows that his book is in the ...”

“... a transvestite in a cultural representation,’ she writes, ‘signals a category crisis.’ So in Peter Pan, the subject of one of the most telling chapters in the book, ‘category crises are everywhere,’ – crises about class, gender and the differences between adults and children. This simple point, that one category always suggests another, leads ...”

“... is to colour the world grey. It can impair memory, concentration and attention span, and make reading almost impossible. It flattens the emotions, causes you to feel physically heavy and lethargic and often makes people seem mere shadows of themselves. Jamison, like many others, found it intolerable, stopped taking it once she started to feel better ...”

“... is the relationship of the frames to architectural motifs and to other types of furniture. Peter Thornton’s The Italian Renaissance Interior is a long, erudite and entertaining investigation of such matters as how rooms were lit and heated, how ceilings were constructed and decorated, where carpets came from and how they were displayed. It is chiefly ...”

“... brother to America in 1928, where her love for glittering New York made her hate herself. After reading Daughter of Earth, a novel by the radical journalist Agnes Smedley, she joined the American Communist Party. She returned to Germany just in time for the Wall Street Crash and, refusing financial help from her family, married Hamburger and set up house in ...”

“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... there was only one child, a girl. This was a mistake: she was supposed to have been a boy called Peter, and although she was baptised Gerda Erika Maria, her father never called her anything but Peter. Appearances mattered to the young Rösels. My mother has told me that my grandmother went hungry so that she could afford ...”

“... laid out what they had found: the official history of the Soviet Communist Party, obligatory reading for CP members, and a book in German about Dürer. When James reported for duty at the War Office, he was casually asked why he hadn’t reported the home visit. James explained that he had no idea whom he should inform. The major took the point, and ...”

“... In the warlord incubators that were the northern valleys, I didn’t see any. I saw no one reading, except for an outdoor class of boys learning the Koran by rote, and nothing on sale that could be read. Basir’s concerns were for the illiterate commanders’ future employment prospects, but what about the consequences of ignorance in their present ...”

“... of the whole, being at once contradictory, camp, Pooterish, self-pitying and vindictive. After reading its melodramatic final sentence – ‘To those who will argue that many things would have been better left unsaid, I can only comment that after a lifetime of enforced silence, there is no choice other than to tell the truth’ – one can only regret ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... the baritone sax player, could. Turner was furious when the record was released with a label reading ‘Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats’. Phillips leased the recording to Chess Records in Chicago and sent copies to, among others, Dewey Phillips, his new best pal, who played it around the clock. It sold half a million copies. ‘Rocket 88’ is ...”

“... or books which go to that mysterious other place in the popular consciousness, when it’s as if reading them has somehow been made compulsory.) This surely implies that there is nothing innate to fantasy which puts people off reading it. But there does appear to be something off-putting about fantasy as an idea. The fact ...”

“... process that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’ On its publication in English in 1997, The Reader was heaped with praise, but also severely criticised for its apparent ...”

“... neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to my daughter and to me, going back even before I went at 15 to live in their house. When she died last November at the age of 94, I’d known Doris for fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never ...”