“... National Servicemen in their time. With Nexus, Virgin Publishing inherited a couple of editors, Peter Darvill-Evans and Kerri Sharp, who had the wit to see that there was an untapped market for ‘erotic fiction written by women for women’ – Femporn. Since John Cleland, men have written pornography for men under female pseudonyms: a tradition which had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... includes open spaces, small spaces, avocados, tall escalators, flying, social kissing and the Blue Peter theme music. But reviewing Christopher’s List of Behavioural Problems, I decided he’d probably be even worse to live with than I am (Christopher, among other things, likes not to talk to people for a long time, not to eat or drink anything for a long ...”

“... Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner’s magisterial works of cultural history is somewhat similar: the cool temperature, the graceful touch, the sensation of resistance being gently annihilated under an accumulation of brilliant particularity.* Resistance, if you have any, is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On 18 October​ 2010 my father, Peter Campbell, was diagnosed with the cancer of which he would die exactly one year and one week later. I do not know precisely how he lived with the knowledge of his approaching death, what denials he practised or accommodations he reached, because he chose – once the oncologist at the Royal Marsden had handed down the death sentence – to live as much as possible as he had before ...”

“... both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton ...”

“... himself an example of Jewish Gnosticism. The original scheme is still in place, and as I was reading this new book, with its cabbalistic title, I was noting that it was but a spume that played upon the ghostly paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading Rose, on the one hand, and, on the other, one of the chapters of the Wagner Handbook or Wagner in Performance, you would not realise that they are talking about the same thing, so different in tone and intent is Rose from the other two. Take as an ...”

“... journalist mentions that he’s ‘taken to smoking weed’ while setting down the words we’re reading – ‘can you tell?’ In another, a small-time columnist with ‘a computer infested with miscarried books’ makes the mistake of looking her work over while stoned: ‘I was too high to follow from the beginning of a sentence to the end, but the ...”

“... getting up even earlier, five or six o’clock, for ‘quiet times’ – private prayer and the reading of the Bible. I’d resolved to read the Bible through every year and at the beginning of training I think I was up to about the Book of Daniel, so I would creep downstairs in the early morning and sit outside, shivering in my Freewheelin’ Bob ...”