“... All good Protestants are supposed to believe that when they read the Bible properly, the Holy Ghost assists them. So what happens when a good Protestant writes with the same assistance? Is the resulting text something like scripture? The orthodox answer would be no: the canon of scripture is closed, and the days of revelation are over ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ‘golden age ...”

“... and surveillance cameras, as an Arcadian grotto. They have no problem with deferred pleasure. They read the future like a transcendent comic strip. Old Thames is rejuvenated in a Mediterranean blue. There are avenues of potential trees, future forests. Docklands is a garden city, clean, broad-avenued, free of traffic and peopled entirely by vibrant ...”

“... the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Moreover, the very lack of acknowledgment could be read as a perverse testimony to the intellectuals’ own superior powers of discernment. They were flattered by the paradox that it was the practical men who showed their naivety precisely by supposing themselves quite exempt from intellectual influences which ...”

“... the first, and in particular the essays by Louis Montrose, Steven Mullaney, Patricia Fumerton and Richard Helgerson. All four are officially teachers of English literature, but their interests, like Greenblatt’s, have led them to transgress disciplinary boundaries and to work on what looks to me rather like cultural history – on problems such as ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... There is perhaps no better guide to the dauntingly complex issues involved in these questions than Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects. First published over twelve years ago, this concise, elegant and wide-ranging book has established itself as an indispensable text for undergraduate courses in aesthetics. The second edition leaves the original text ...”

“... urban safari park, I was robbed at knife point in Brixton. The frog who dared to croak is Richard Sennett’s first novel and umpteenth book. Like other philosophers (Russell, Wollheim, Scruton, Koestler), he evidently sees fiction as something he ought to chance his arm at, once at least. I’m no judge, but his social-philosophical writing (notably ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”

“... academics might seem an unlikely topic for him. He found out about their work after the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested in a joint review of Moneyball that the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, could be read as a case study in support ...”

“... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...”

“... he became senior prefect in his house. In 1941 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics; he spent the last year of the war in the Intelligence Corps, working at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi. A child of Empire, then, and beneficiary of all the privileges bestowed by an élite education; his family was wealthy, his mother a ...”

“... the meticulous administration which lay behind the glamorous crusading enterprises of King Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1190s, leaving him at least king of Cyprus, if not of Jerusalem. The Pipe Rolls of the English Exchequer, in the National Archives at Kew, are great clumps of feet-long parchment, which I remember from my research student days as best ...”

“... historical contexts. A.A. Long’s recent book on Epictetus, like the work of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji on ancient philosophical therapy, reminds us of something lost in the modern academy and not at all prominent in Kenny, but regarded by all major Greek and Roman thinkers from Socrates on as the heart of the matter: the idea and practice of ...”