“... not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no closed doors. Ackroyd, for instance, can read the expression on the dead Dickens face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the look which he saw in the faces of the corpses on view in the Paris Morgue. This ...”

“... of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely different: ‘The goose is ...”

“... of blarney in this passionately articulate novel, which takes certain surreal premises as read in order to conduct its mythic discussion of Irish histories. To grant these premises for the duration of a reading is in this case, as it is not in much ‘playful’ fiction, to be carried with great momentum into an unfamiliar but internally consistent ...”

“... teacher, with whom she has ‘tremendous rows about her progressive approaches to teaching’. Peter’s Benthamite training has rendered him ‘traditional ... conformist ... reductionist ... mechanist’ (another lexicon of Holbrookian dirty words). Psychologically Peter has ‘buried the boy within him, very ...”

“... have been made safe; let us hope for the sake of their souls that some of them winced when they read the formal, dogmatic, curatorial language with which Mr Wallis has embalmed their rebellions. Not that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his ...”

“... which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that indefinable ...”

“... 1989 ... The occasion is probably remembered by participants in the session more by the fact that Peter Stallybrass and I enacted stage cross-dressing there and then by exchanging jackets before delivering our papers, than for what we either of us had to say.’ The surreptitiously tape-recorded row which followed Jardine’s paper on Othello when it was ...”

“... at a television essay on the theme of November, the presenter lost his place in the script and read out lyrical sentences about city fogs over footage of farmers ploughing for winter, and vice versa. The whole programme was broadcast live. The BBC cancelled the next edition. But not the show: in 1953, with only one TV channel available, nearly half the ...”

“... whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses in celebration of onanism, incurring a presumably superfluous three-year ban on crossing the school’s threshold. Romilly himself, however, had run away from Wellington by the time the first issue of ...”

“... their advantage,’ she told Richardson), but was a frequent visitor to her local bookseller and read a lot of fiction, poetry and theology. Her husband too was a keen reader and they enjoyed discussing which characters they admired and loathed.One novel gripped them more than all the rest: Richardson’s gigantic Clarissa, published serially (with agonising ...”

“... the signal system we use, hoping to come off as real and sincere.You’re going to find it hard to read a good Life of a good actor without throwing the book aside in frustration. Sure, he’s an angel, a genius, a charmer, but such a muddle and a mess, not to mention a pain in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does ...”

“... useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled ...”

“... life of a father confessor to the nuns there: ‘Then after supper it is usual for him to read a little of Venus and Adonis, the jests of George Peele, or some such scurrilous book: for there are few idle pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.’ The Rape of Lucrece is less obviously licentious – and certainly much less fun ...”

“... architects arrived in London, the Hampstead coterie was invigorated by émigré friends. Herbert Read had visions of a British Bauhaus when Walter Gropius arrived from Berlin, László Moholy-Nagy taught Hepworth how to make photograms and Berthold Lubetkin designed the penguin pool at London Zoo. There was an opportunity, Maclean writes, to establish London ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having ...”