“... was that this novel, and its successors, represent the author’s greatest achievement. Ray’s reading of Thackeray’s fiction was based on what he called ‘the buried life’ to be found in them; and in his view even the late novels, written when Thackeray was chronically sick, were works of genius. Thackeray was undervalued by posterity because, unlike ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”

“... book’s ideas took shape as Hoggart tried to win his evening-class students over to new ways of reading literature and to seeing advertising as something that could also be ‘read’. He was one of a large number of men and women who committed themselves to furthering the postwar expansion of secondary schooling and adult education and to the larger ...”

“... and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I discovered that Defoe was probably the most prolific writer ...”

“... and Exter, let alone such important directors of Russian descent as Pitoeff, Komisarjevsky, Peter Brook and Jacques Tati, all of which is surely relevant to the modern reader’s view of the subject. He also virtually omits the cabaret and the ‘Blue Blouse’ agitprop movement, though he gives a useful account of the latter’s successor, the TRAM ...”

“... say anything about this place. Come you on back and live here, then you can talk. Back in Donegal, reading the papers and watching the Ulster News I feel a voyeur, a political tourist. It’s then, for whatever reason – self-disgust, self-consciousness, that guilty intermittent sense of whatever breathing down your neck – it’s then when you’re in ...”

“... uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep gloom and an ill-stuffed armchair with a clip-on reading lamp. Some of the older staff remembered the old gentleman. He was a strict employer, they told me, and so it seemed. Portraits of the couple convey a chilling disdain. I expect they were as jolly as crickets. Home to more serious business. Three large ...”

“... to these emotions was one thing that made you a Puritan. We grasp this point more readily from reading Dent than from a dozen theological treatises of the period. The most spirited exchanges in The Plain Man’s Pathway are between Theologus and the caviller Antilegon. Theologus calls Antilegon an atheist, although not in the modern sense. ‘Atheist’ in ...”

“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... expansive sociopolitical presentation of the self was, perhaps, becoming more problematic. This reading offers a valuable foil to vulgar-Freudian formulations. It undercuts the ‘hydraulic’ image of the history of sex, read as the resultant of contrary pressures – the unconscious and the conscious, mind and flesh, emerging in cycles of yea-saying and ...”