“... At least I assume this is the case, since we hear enough about it. The book is constructed in the Richard Rogers style, with all the functional background stuff displayed ostentatiously on the outside. There is a Thirlwellesque narrator, a writer who lives in East London, drinks a lot of coffee, and has recently ‘got back into the practice of dope’. He ...”

“... children to feed the ducks, just like our parents used to do with us. And we watched the news and read the papers, which was the usual depressing experience. The two main stories in June were the handing over to relatives of the dead of the report by the Northern Ireland police’s Historical Enquiries Team into the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which ten ...”

“... was the Sun’s front-page splash on 15 February: ‘Shock Claims in Secret File’, the strapline read, with a hammer and sickle at either end. The story was based on recently declassified documents in the Czech Security Forces Archive which record three meetings between Corbyn and a Czech diplomat. Two of the meetings, which occurred in 1986 and 1987, appear ...”

“... 6 May). It takes its title from a letter written by Ede’s friend Naum Gabo to Herbert Read: ‘Any thing or action which enhances life, propels it and adds to it something in the direction of growth, expansion and development, is Constructive … I try to guard in my work the image of the morrow we left behind us … and to remind us that the ...”

“... sake why?’ ‘Not up to it,’ came the cheerful reply. Throughout his premiership Attlee read only the Times, partly for its cricket coverage but also, he said, because knowing its bitterly anti-Labour views in advance, he always found reading it ‘restful’. Attitudes of this sort did not sit well with a party which has always seen itself as a ...”

“... any language other than English. This last claim may at first sight seem absurd to anyone who has read the sometimes witty and always rigorous exposition of logical positivist doctrine that appeared in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as ...”

“... down some drops of rain, and the wind hissed among the swaying pines, an actor and an actress read some of Lawrence’s writings on New Mexico. The actor was dressed in a khaki jacket and trousers of a somewhat military cut; the actress was preternaturally red in the checks and black about the eyes. Somebody else played a flute solo. Then people filed ...”

“... the whole poem by heart) ‘To Constantia Singing’, which Shelley wrote to Claire in 1817. She read it with such affection and verve that it seemed to me she had crossed the Atlantic for no other purpose. Whether or not Shelley had sex with Claire, he certainly thought about it and yearned for it. My heart is quivering like a flame: As morning dew that in ...”

“... shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms. Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many ...”

“... no such thing as a ‘first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary’. You don’t have to have read Metroland to be fairly sure that the ‘well-praised first novel’ in question is Barnes’s own: not only because the quoted sentence sounds suspiciously as though it were written by Braithwaite (and therefore by Barnes) but because it’s an opportunity ...”

“... Bildung – her engagement with Communism, feminism, psychoanalysis and Sufism – is often read by literary critics as the symbolic history of our age, just as ‘D.H. Lawrence’s proposal that the Industrial Revolution began in the Eastwood of his boyhood and was finally exorcised in the woods of the Chatterley estate is a received fact of literary ...”

“... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...”

“... he said. He became politically active campaigning for Brexit. In a lull in our conversation he read aloud the Bible inscriptions etched on the ceiling. ‘I’m not terribly religious, but the past, the present and the future should all be taken into account,’ he told me. I was happy to chat. I had time to kill: my online application for a press pass had ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... He learned through experience to moderate his alcohol intake and learned, too, that he could now read Nietzsche without risking his own sanity. His father died during the first year, leaving Jung the man of the house, but he returned regularly in Jung’s dreams, leaving Jung too embarrassed to tell him he was dead. Thereafter, Jung seriously wondered about ...”