“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”

“... good deal of undercover subtlety. Hart-Davis liked Walpole as a man, even found his works ‘easy reading’, but had few illusions as to Walpole’s standing as a writer; at a period when plain speaking was less allowable than today, he dealt openly with the exacting brand of homosexuality which drew Walpole towards middle-aged married men. Sympathy on the ...”

“... century, created a series of portraits of Mary Magdalene as a contemporary great lady, sitting reading or playing the lute (examples by the same artist showing her with pen, ink, ruler, sand caster and blotter – surely some of the earliest depictions of a woman writing – are sadly not included). The striking Salon group portrait by Jean Béraud, La ...”

“... in their Kingdom.’ Solitaries, Evelyn claimed, ‘have . . . no passions, save the sensual’. Reading these strictures, or the many other 17th-century jeremiads against solitude, Pepys would not have thought to apply them to his solitary sexual pleasures. It took another finger-wagging text to make the connection: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... with some other unflinching obiter dicta: ‘many a widow, thinking that the funeral, if not the reading of the will, would mark the end of all that could be expected from her in the way of public griefs, has found that some problems are just beginning.’ The novella, though on the whole less interesting than the book’s second part, offers all the detail ...”

“... Des Dalton, the vice president of Republican Sinn Féin, spent most of his time on the platform reading passages from Eire Nua, a programme drafted by the Provos in the early 1970s. There was no attempt to explain how that document (a rather charming vision of an all-Ireland state divided into four provinces, each with its own parliament) might be ...”

“... played a bohemian version of house: seeing two or three movies a day, eating crummy Chinese food, reading in bed and singing Edith Piaf in the shower together. They moved to Europe, immersed themselves in art, shoplifted food and books – one story has Saint Phalle producing a first edition of Madame Bovary from under her mother’s mink coat. She modelled ...”

“... interventions produced such enormous results that, by 1983, the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots ...”

“... is different for readers. We can forswear the authors we disapprove of, but as long as we are reading them we are their accomplices. I should say too that, as Angier well knows, Sebald is not ‘a normal novelist’ – not a novelist at all, he himself said (‘my medium is prose, not the novel’). And his method is not to have real people ‘stand ...”

“... draw a crowd anywhere in any country, but they come to watch the performance rather than to hear a reading. He no longer strips off as he was likely to do in youth or early middle age, but when doing a tour with Bob Dylan he suggested that they should be filmed together in bed, talking about ‘ecology, capitalism, communism, God, poetry, meditation and ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes to mind. The life of the House of Windsor in the days when it wasn’t ever thus, was like the soup of the day, so appropriately ...”

“... much much worse.’ Yes much much worse. As literature, that is – or perhaps one should say as reading matter. Reviewing Peter Manso’s Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick went into the question, moral and aesthetic, of the taped book. The genre, with Mayhew as its godfather, began with the best intentions. ‘The sequential ...”