“... 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 ...”

“... and true – inside the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I ...”

“... book on the Moonies is one of the most striking pieces of investigative writing that I have read for a long time. It tells the story of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it ...”

“... red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.’ The American novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, who read that sentence at the age of 15, ‘was appropriately amazed’. He repeated the line to everybody who would listen. ‘There was no doubt about my opinion of such a remarkable and modern paragraph – I was convinced it was marvellous.’ Paul Sorrentino ...”

“... biography ever written, and I should know, because I am probably the only person ever to have read it twice – once because I wanted to know about Stock, and once in preparation for writing this review. It is boring on a heroic scale: excluding the appendices (which, being extracts from Beddoes’s writings, are not boring), it is 413 pages long, without ...”

“... consequent faultline threatens to bring down the whole structure. Here’s the problem: you can read adaptationism as saying that environments select creatures for their fitness; or you can read it as saying that environments select traits for their fitness. It looks like the theory must be ...”

“... covered the floorboards. I offered him $1200 cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read ‘Laugh, live, love and be happy!’ and warned: ‘Don’t take it over 45 or it’ll throw a rod.’ A friend later explained: ‘That’s a polite way of saying the engine will explode.’ Having to drive slow, pleasingly to my mind, made fun of the two ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... chord – onto a dominant seventh, itself a discord crying out for resolution. But we can also read this reluctance to resolve as the musical equivalent of staying awake: a bid to suspend the passage of time, in which sleep gratefully acquiesces.I am interested in the way we take in Wagner’s music, or the way it takes us in. In tonal music a final ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... dividing his time between games, the Officers’ Training Corps, walking in the countryside (Richard Jefferies was an enduring hero), and excitedly discovering writers. With Shakespeare, Blake was an early enthusiasm (everything was early in Sorley’s life); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, he told his parents, was supposed to be the finest drama ...”