“... Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan ...”

“... out to be true.’‘Bieberbach was a tremendous achievement, there’s no question about it,’ Peter Sarnak of the Institute for Advanced Studies says. ‘Louis de Branges hit the big time there, really. It was a great problem . . . and his solution was absolutely brilliant, really brilliant.’ But Sarnak is one of many who dismiss his Riemann Hypothesis ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from her work; today her poems are rather criticised than praised for having about them what Peter Trinder called in his 1984 biography ‘a domestic tidiness’. The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... John Wolfenden, former headmaster of Uppingham and Shrewsbury, and Vice-Chancellor of Reading University from 1950 to 1963) he seemed destined, towards the world of international journalism. The first was Neal Ascherson, two years ahead of him at Eton, a formidable intelligence, who went to Cambridge and subsequently became a distinguished ...”

“... time as MacAskill and Ord started their work), The Life You Can Save (founded by the philosopher Peter Singer), Good Ventures (founded by the Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who have pledged to give away most of their money), Animal Charity Evaluators (an 80,000 Hours spin-off) and the Open Philanthropy Project (a collaboration ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... between a mature applicant and his MI5 selection board in 1981. ‘Have you any objection to reading other people’s mail?’ he was asked – suggesting that the old prejudice was still alive in some quarters. ‘What did the Board think I had been doing for the past 20 odd years!’ the applicant wondered. Those 20-odd years had been spent in the ...”

“... Before I went to Westminster I lived entirely in books and the past. I looked forward to reading Virgil and Pope and finding someone to talk to about Medieval coins, which I collected avidly. That is what I meant by saying that I was a prig. The interests of the boys I found myself among seemed confined to games, bullying and sex. I was, quite ...”

“... wrong?Puritans emerged from chaos. Luther’s wish that the laity act as their own priests, reading vernacular Bibles, bred contention not just between traditionalists and reformers but among the reformers themselves. Everyone had their own idea of what the new order should be. Some were content with modest alterations to the liturgy. Saints, for ...”