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“... 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 ...”

“... Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ‘golden age ...”

“... How are we to read the history of sexuality? In the Introduction volume to his great multi-volume essay in critical-revisionism, Michel Foucault set out to demystify the discourse which has informed post-Victorian accounts about sex, whether therapeutic (Reich), scholarly (Bloch) or polemical (Marcuse). Such histories were traditionally cast in a progressive, Whiggish, emancipatory framework, presupposing a dialectics of drives, repression and liberation ...”

“... man, whose character was too powerful not to have its disconcerting sides’. But the book was read as ‘a bitter cry from a world without tenderness and without gaiety’, or, as Frederic Harrison put it, ‘a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity’. Virginia Woolf agreed, speaking of the ‘almost insane religious mania of the ...”

“... the horse-drawn mail to reach more distant parts of the country, not to mention the time needed to read and absorb long essay-articles. There were polemical exchanges among the leading contributors to each organ, in which cut might be followed by thrust – but only after a long interval.Changes in the technology of paper-making and printing combined with the ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global ...”

“... latest findings, and adding fifteen thousand words to the original length. It may be profitably read along with the new works now seeing the light, since it brings out so strikingly the broad likenesses and unlikenesses between industrial and pre-industrial England, particularly with regard to family life and population levels. Laslett prefers to call the ...”