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“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... and tribal’ in their campaign against AV seems to have surprised Clegg, although a quick reading of any history of the Conservative Party would have enlightened him. Furthermore, his primary and endlessly repeated defence of the coalition (that it has to clear up the terrible mess left behind by Labour), though not completely untrue, contains a large ...”

“... rare that someone is individually responsible for a collapse. My professor at architecture school, Peter Galdi, liked to talk about the Manhattan Bridge. It was then nearly a hundred years old; maintenance on the bridge had been deferred for decades; a thorough survey had been made of its soft spots. No one, Galdi told us, knew what was holding it ...”

“... is unable to grasp the reality of the conflict. According to the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn, My First Wife is ‘exactest, most scrupulous autobiography’, ‘authentic to the last detail’. But it’s hard to shake off the impression that Ganna-Speyer is Wassermann-Herzog’s creation: it isn’t just books and class that have ...”

“... account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in some significant passages his vision is strongly coloured by German Romanticism. No ecclesiastical building still in use impresses him ...”

“... Nivison had recorded art-world gossip, details of their travels, marital problems, what they were reading (often aloud to one another) and watching, and often the step-by-step progress of her husband’s major paintings. Nivison’s impact on Hopper was discussed in Vivien Green Fryd’s book Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward ...”

“... possession of competencies and techniques that are now obscure. Today the kind of food-letters in Peter Binoit’s Still Life with Letter Pastries (c.1615) – a pretzel-like ‘P’, ‘R’ and ‘B’ next to a silver plate of capon and olives – don’t carry much cultural capital (alphabet spaghetti at your dinner party?), but in the 17th century such ...”

“... to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail which is its intention. 27 January. A reading of the new draft of The History Boys at the NT Studio gets off to a bad start when half the cast are found to be reading from a first draft and the rest from the revised version. It’s a scratch round-up of whoever’s ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... It has more dramatic punch: it is, as Ms Gill says, ‘Elizabethan rather than Jacobean’. Reading it right through (rather than having to rummage around in appendices for it), one is struck by its pacy, episodic speed. This is partly a result of textual losses, but it is also an authentic feature of Marlowe’s stagecraft in plays like The Jew of ...”

“... so I thought: ‘I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night.’ And I was reading Philip Larkin, where he says about nothing like something happening anywhere. The next Saturday it was West Brom at home. Puppy love, pop tunes, A-level poetry, crap soccer. This seems to be the recipe. Old soccer bores don’t really stand a ...”

“... who doubt that lexicography has a human face – wearing at times a crooked grin – might try reading W.S. Ramson’s essay (‘G’day,’ it says) on the Australian National Dictionary, where they will learn much concerning diggers, cobbers, mateship, bludgers and larrikins and jackeroos, the bush and the outback, and other news from Oz; and if you ...”

“... reduced to a series of complex quadratic equations. Yet if Eagleton had transvalued his reading of Williams, Eliot and Leavis, he did not manage to purge himself wholly of their influence. The literary history offered in Criticism and Ideology was a tacit rewriting of Leavis’s ‘great tradition’. The Victorian and modern ‘major ...”

“... reminded me of Francis Crick’s motto, written in large letters on the wall behind his desk: ‘Reading Rots the Mind.’ A young theoretician friend of ours stated his reasons more explicitly: ‘I don’t see why I should read the bloody nonsense other people write when I can read my own papers.’ I find that young scientists tend to read too ...”

“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”