“... 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 ...”

“... Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins with Rabelais and ends with Pasternak. It includes discussion of novels in ...”

“... in history to abide by his own teachings. Some 2500 years later, in 1975, the philosopher Peter Unger published a book called Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, in which, at the stupendous length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... forthright about Dickens’s unrelenting coldness to his mother and his wife. More centrally, his reading of Dickens’s late work – the novels, stories and the first-person journalism – show how far it reflects events in his life. Dickens spent his last years in constant travel and increasing pain. He moved between his house, Gad’s Hill, and his ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... there for 12,000 years before the Europeans showed up. Printers vied to slake the thirst of the reading public for tidings of points west. Utopia was duly mapped as an island somewhere in the west Atlantic. More did his best to give its physical being credibility: Ambrosius Holbein, Hans’s elder brother, furnished a woodcut of it for the 1518 Basel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... generosity. Rereading Sons and Lovers is to be filled afresh – more even than at a first reading – with the truth of Leavis’s old dictum that here is ‘where life flows’, as well as with that of Lawrence himself: trust the tale and not the teller. It is not the tale which absorbs one here, however, so much as the closeness and richness of ...”

“... have been written for the King ... useful book for a ruler [the Melibee] ... essential reading for a monarch [the Boethius]’. There is nevertheless a note of asperity in Pearsall’s remark that the snobbish British urge to prevent Chaucer from looking like Mr Nobody from Nowhere is matched by a democratising American urge ‘to emphasise that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”