“... often willing to experiment with highly volatile social materials.’ So the bishops became, in Peter Brown’s striking phrase, impresarios of the sacred. They took the bodies of the saints from their shrines outside the cities, and placed them under the altars of their cathedrals. Rather than a trigger for conflicting pieties, the saint became a centre of ...”

“... over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store – the reading, the categories, the associations – had gone down with that great listing clay-coloured hulk. And though much of what he knew he had written down and published, either as lectures or in reviews, there was always more, the flurry of memoirs and ...”

“... in political matters too when she wrote to a fan, Eddie Cohen, who had sought her out after reading a story she published in Seventeen the summer before she went to Smith. ‘I consider my story not far from the usual Seventeen drivel,’ she wrote. ‘Why is it that my particular brand of drivel rates such subtle flattery?’ Replying to his reply, she ...”

“... mouth was impossible to grasp because I didn’t understand the basis.Can​ I read this before reading the other five books in the series?A. Yes, because this one begins with the publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in ...”

“... in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy.I’ve pieced this together from my reading, and googling, and I may well have things wrong. Ernaux hasn’t written about her life in a neat this-then-that sort of way. Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over ...”

“... scholarly biography of the poet and her family in 1974; and Ralph Franklin’s variorum and reading editions of the poems in 1998 and 1999. The problems posed by the translation into print of manuscript poems never prepared for publication have been the subject of much recent discussion by scholars to whose work Gordon understands her own to be ...”

“... lose themselves, tourists – cocooned in Holiday Inns never really leave home. Travel outstrips reading, the guidebook, common language; tourism moves in an envelope of familiarity, experiencing the already advertised. Lindop can register the appeal of the former, notably in his ‘Traveller at Yazd’: The signs ahead are scarlet Arabic: a manic exuberant ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... that cultural tourists should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance of themselves by following Walter Scott in the street, demanding to be allowed to draw him. But they were disappointed by British art, and of the modern buildings Defauconpret could only mutter: ‘des briques, des ...”

“... aim to give, and granted its scope and its plan, it could not have given, the kind of picture that Peter Brown has given, in his life of Augustine and other books about early Christianity, of what it was like to be someone at a certain date in Alexandria or in Carthage, wondering what to believe. It is not, in that sense, a work of history, as distinct from ...”

“... and spiritual meanings insisted on by Bunyan, and thus elides the challenge of the work as a reading experience, but that he obscures important ways in which The Pilgrim’s Progress contributes to the genesis and future of the novel – in particular, how its graphic realisation of the psychology and emotional circumstances of its hero (and at times ...”

“... keen attention suggests the ‘mindfulness’ of Zen practitioners, a connection made explicit in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which is ‘nature writing’ and Buddhist primer in roughly equal proportions. Thoreau described himself as ‘one who loved so well the philosophy of India’, and peppered Walden with quotations from the Vedas, the ...”

“... Blanford, one of them supposedly the other’s creation, and both a curious blend of Oscar Wilde, Peter Pan and l’homme moyen sensuel. The mist of uncertain identity which shrouds Sutcliffe and Blanford radiates out to the other members of the charmed circle. Monsieur, like Justine at the commencement of the ‘Alexandria Quartet’, must now be regarded as ...”

“... always being torn apart by war. The History of the Peloponnesian War was thought to be instructive reading for 18th-century constitution-makers who could learn from it what not to do. As the Pennsylvanian Benjamin Rush put it, in a knock-down response to the anti-Federalists who were jealously clinging on to the independence of their separate states: ‘A ...”

“... Art (less formal and scholarly than Saskia Hamilton’s), was published in 1994. You can see by reading it why Lowell tried so hard to please her. Here he is describing Marianne Moore – a close friend of Bishop’s – at a reading ‘before thousands’ in the Boston Public Garden: She entered with a black coat and ...”