“... than justice to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s work, a welcome alternative view is provided by Peter Hacker’s new book, Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy. This was written as a synoptic essay to accompany the huge four-part Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, which he began working on twenty years ago ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”