“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sinclair Lewis won the first American Nobel Prize he said she should have got it instead. She was read by H.L. Mencken with ‘increasing joy’. She was also lampooned for writing in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his ...”

“... to have been one of Buhari’s aides, though he provides no details – this is pretty hard to read without flinching. But the double standards at work shouldn’t distract from the bogusness of the do-gooding part of Blair’s proposition. Deliverology is itself a false prospectus. It relies on the assumption that Blair gradually mastered these skills on ...”

“... who specialises in ripping yarns of war and espionage, full of sympathy and comic irony, which read like thrillers yet thrive on fact. Soon after the Hampstead party, Fuchs was recruited by Soviet military intelligence, to which he passed notes about fission in the uranium isotope U-235, usually by means of circuitous taxi rides or in parcels left on ...”

“... shall let it go for now. If Mr Black wishes to know why I may choose to spare him, he will have to read to the end of this article, or pay someone else to read that far on his behalf. These two books, both by working Fleet Streeters who go on at length about their own lives and times, furnish my excuse for this extended ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fascism but about our system, or any form of totalitarian regime’. The facts of his life can be read either way. The Shostakovich family, like most Petersburg intellectuals, held mildly radical views in 1917; there was even a Bolshevik uncle on his mother’s side. Mitya, who was 11 in 1917, was a child prodigy, and despite the unpropitious times achieved ...”

“... Transvaal,’ Tsar Nicholas wrote to his sister at the outbreak of the Boer War. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’ Britain’s ...”