“... is paid to nanoseconds and megabytes, and in his spare time, we are told, he ‘likes to read/ Eclectically from Mann to Bede’. If so, he reads merely from boredom, since it has no measurable effects upon his life. There could hardly be a more striking contrast with Pushkin’s characters. Onegin and his Tatyana may not have been great readers, but ...”

“... boyish, plain-faced Willa and her handsome, theatrical, feminine mother who bore seven children, read romantic fiction – including Sir Walter Scott – and dominated her family. There seems to have been much struggle against her daughter’s adolescent ‘William Cather Jr’ role: Willa wanted none of the Southern lady posture and decorum. But the mature ...”

“... still produced in Egypt during the Middle Ages, but gradually edged out by parchment and paper. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the mid-12th century, saw all three materials as profane surfaces on which to inscribe holy texts: God reads, you say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... punk, but I’d caught up with ska. I liked Burroughs, Kerouac, Borges, Kafka and Orwell. I’d read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I’d read Camus, in translation. I wore Dr Martens boots. At home I secretly drank my mum and dad’s Martini and in the pub I pretended to like beer. I watched a lot of TV. I liked ...”

“... Draper and Noel Coward. Thus no modern writer can have taken more literally the injunction to ‘read out loud the sentence you have just written’ – except that Keillor has spoken not just an individual sentence or two but the whole story plus a raft of variations tried out over the years. His writings consequently have not merely their own particular ...”

“... he/she gets prompter acceptance and payment for a review than for a poem or a story. We have all read about how the essay is itself an honourable genre (obeisances to Michel de Montaigne), and most of us by now know that there is no fixed frontier between literature and journalism: all the same, some writing is designedly ephemeral whereas some isn’t, and ...”

“... Anne Maclean, two lecturers in philosophy at the University College of Swansea, when they first read the dissertation in 1989. They reckoned that half of it had been copied out of books. Yet, they discovered to their horror, the lucky student had got his MA without a viva or a word of criticism. Something was plainly wrong in the university’s Centre for ...”

“... a great many of the virtues that make the golden-age detective story still one of the most widely read literary forms. They have their share of cosiness, with menace lurking underneath; they exploit class-consciousness – humorously, with none of that deadening Thirties snobbery; they use traditional humours, and gently mock traditional humours, and gently ...”

“... with something more like anger than resignation. The counter-irritant that came into my mind as I read was Hal Summers’s requiem for his cat: he would not pretend That what came was a friend But met it in pure hate, Well died, my old cat. The Zorzas had had time to prepare, and Parkes writes that those who do tend to be better survivors. Leach and his ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... abbreviated to 40 for Empty Words. Even that, though, is excessive. One does not, of course, read the text that Cage has contrived, so much as simply acknowledge it. Once we have recognised the premise, we have done all that was necessary. The words themselves, potent with meaning in Joyce, have been robbed of their force by the rote-efficiency of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out about the types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition and to read them in order to throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood.’ It is a vast subject (what work of art or literature doesn’t have something to say about metamorphosis?) but also an elusive one, as Warner is well aware, comparing herself to ...”

“... been deceived into by undercover officers. Many more would follow.In 2013, one former SDS officer, Peter Francis, spoke publicly about the unit’s role in spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by a gang of white youths in 1993, a fact that had not been disclosed to the Macpherson Inquiry into the police failure to properly ...”