“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... After her parents died, my aunt went on with her solitary walks and secret meals, kept up her reading and film-going. Then, over a dozen years ago, everything changed. One day, while coming back from Maidenhead Thicket, my aunt had a stroke. People who saw her didn’t know what was wrong. She tried to get a lift from a milk-float, but the driver thought ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... by Cecil’s ‘pagan’ dew-dabbling activities, arms herself with a large drink before a poetry reading. She starts falling asleep as Cecil recites a bit of his own work (‘Love comes not always in by the front door’ is one memorable line, declaimed in a ‘homiletic’ fashion), waking up in time to hear Tennyson’s lines from In Memoriam about a ...”