“... the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples. More recently, they read it in India’s version of Classic Comics (the Amar Chitra Katha series) or saw it in the hugely successful televised version, 94 episodes, based largely on the comic book; the streets of India were empty (or as empty as anything ever is in India) during the ...”

“... now it’s an age of smooth men, of judgments based on appearance. Commentators are quick to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... cops, intelligent strippers with hearts of gold: a generically complacent agenda. But good fun to read from a few thousand miles away. You don’t have to worry, at that distance, about suspending disbelief. You’re happy to swallow an ex-state governor called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who chooses to live on road kills, a swamp rat whose ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”