“... of this projection of Stalin as the central figure in a whole nation’s art? Among the things I read in order to find a way into this wide-ranging and eccentric book, I was particularly struck by three anecdotes about Stalin, which may or may not be true. First, there was a story about the leader’s library, told by Edvard Radzinsky in his ...”

“... had no more humour than P.G. Wodehouse in his rosy style. Waugh deeply admired Wodehouse, and read and re-read him all his working life. But humour in fiction is about an interest in real people, and Waugh had no such interest. Neither, probably, had Wodehouse. Both knew what they could do, and did it to ...”

“... 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 ambition of making art and literature part of ordinary life in a more democratic ...”

“... an adolescent he was gaunt, emotionally erratic and intellectually precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way ...”

“... criticise: www.math.purdue.edu/~branges.There is no evidence that, so far, any mathematician has read it: de Branges and his proof appear to have been ostracised by the profession. I have talked to a number of mathematicians about him and his work over the last few years and it seems that the profession has come to the view that nothing he does in this area ...”

“... he has secretly invested in McCoy’s securities firm, Pierce and Pierce. A sodden British hack, Peter Fallow, who works for the depraved newspaper City Light, is assigned to the case of the white assassin who is supposedly being protected by friends in high places. (One of the more mordant truths proclaimed by this novel is that in high places there are no ...”

“... meaning is clearly stated it’s treated as irrelevant or unfashionable. Every generation wants to read Brecht afresh for itself. And some would agree with Henry Glade who writes in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice: ‘to be effective, Brecht’s plays have to be treated as classical texts, rigidly subjected to a contemporising ...”

“... speaking which would offer an advance. There is no sign that this is likely to happen. True, Sir Peter Medawar effected a brief release when challenging his field’s version of the nature-nurture antithesis with the instance of innate potentialities never to be actualised unless the environment were right. But feud is collusive, and the parties usually ...”

“... is the single piece of writing for which he is best known and the first poem many people will read by Ashbery, particularly people on this side of the Atlantic. Like other ‘anthology-poems’, ‘Self-Portrait’ derives its popularity from the agreeable accessibility of its central figure, the sort of image we see of ourselves on the back of a ...”

“... lengthy considerations of mundane domestic and personal matters – get up, wash, dress, work, read a book, make a cup of tea, make a hot-water bottle, watch TV – and whether I can give a fuck about doing all, some or any of these things, or not-giving-a-fuck-withstanding, and going against every cell of my state of being, I should or could make the ...”

“... mode of conversing, that I was myself not much astonished when he told me, that he had scarcely read over one of those inimitable Essays before they were sent to the Press.’ Stories of Johnson’s rapid composition and the prose-like quality of his conversation abound, and though, in his edition of Hawkins’s Life, O.M. Brack corrects Hawkins by ...”

“... rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... years.’ Hence these are to be seen as ‘the diaries of a socialist-in-the-making’. What they read like, however, are the diaries of an effective politician on the make. Benn would certainly acknowledge as much. So far from seeking to disguise it, he makes clear that he is presenting his diaries as a grim moral tale. This places the reader in a ...”

“... on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a ...”

“... happen here. But the prevailing breeziness in the UK seems to me ill-founded, and I’m not alone. Peter Olson, until recently the chairman and CEO of Random House, wrote in Publishers Weekly last month: ‘While 2008 ended on a disappointing and even discouraging note for many in the book industry, the outlook for the new year is even bleaker. One-time ...”