“... says Edmund at one point, ‘I could have been peeled like an onion.’ And again: ‘If you read between the lines of any story, including mine, you find the blank spaces where the truth is to be found.’ And again: ‘I am realising more and more that this is not Roscoe’s story, nor the panda’s, but is mine.’ Such hints are picked up in the ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of –––, as the play called Frankenstein’s creature. Mary Shelley, who went ...”

“... day could be, as well as expressing the literary likes and dislikes of two reasonably well-read men of different generations. There is rather too much cricket for my own taste, but Alan Ross – perhaps the only writer on cricket I can assimilate – is extolled early on as ‘the first poet’ to report an MCC tour in ...”

“... down a few doors, leaning on unusual suspects. John Jasper is an avatar of the patricide painter Richard Dadd. Dadd, by this account, lost his marbles under an Egyptian sun, trying to keep pace with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Phillips couldn’t keep still: he drove on remorselessly. As Seabrook sweeps through Egyptology, psychological profiling, snap ...”

“... artist and comedian of terror, was beginning to lose his audience. Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read’s weasels were infecting the landscape with rumours: all the creeping, ugly dream-things the Twins had always vigorously suppressed were daring to emerge by daylight. The aura of magical protection that encircled these backlands, the dusty parcel of ...”

“... was thus immense. Hurd found only one setting by Gurney of his own words, where the musician Richard Carder, searching the archive in 1993, found 16. And as recently as 1996 a letter was unearthed, there since the beginning, enclosing 13 hitherto unknown poems of 1919. The pattern Kavanagh contrived from ‘upwards of 1700 items of verse of all ...”

“... and contentious ‘naturalism’ – and constitute a kind of fragmentary poetics by which we can read his fiction and verse. They also bear witness to a lifetime’s dedication to collecting morbid incongruities: a chicken’s roost under a gilt placard of the Lord’s Prayer, a dead baby on a doctor’s mantlepiece, a crucified Christ rising from a parterre ...”

“... of argument characteristic of the Continental tradition), Cavell suggests that Derrida has not read Austin with sufficient closeness. He furthermore suggests that Derrida’s evident lack of understanding may be traced to one of the few traits that his style of deconstruction has in common with A.J. Ayer’s brand of logical positivism: an irresistible ...”

“... what he ate.’ It’s a scattershot complaint, but well made all the same. You don’t want to read a travel book which presses upon you, perversely, how much time the author has spent sitting in a chair reading – in which the principal journey has been made by fingers flicking through a library’s card index. Nor should travel writing approximate to an ...”

“... much exaggerated. He has therefore, against Shaw’s wishes, republished the lot, advising us to read with caution the praise of Sterndale Bennett and with disbelief one piece of anti-Wagnerism. His decision to do this seems partly to have rested on the fact that Shaw did not destroy these notices, which are now part of the Shaw Collection in the British ...”

“... Bernard Williams had a very large mind. To read these three posthumously published collections of essays (there will be a fourth, on opera) is an overwhelming reminder of his incandescent and all-consuming intelligence. He brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time ...”

“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”

“... Or, as she put it herself, unromantically, when she won the Booker: ‘In the stories I used to read when I was a little girl cab-horses used to win the National . . . but you can’t expect this in real life.’ The letters make clear how far from reality both the public perception and to some extent the private, self-deprecating persona were. For one ...”

“... like to be the poet my father reads.’ This can’t mean, ‘I’d like my father to read my poetry,’ since his father presumably did, whether he liked it or not. His mother certainly did, and didn’t like it, as Harrison tells us in other poems. It doesn’t mean: ‘I wish my father was someone different, the sort of person who reads ...”