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“... jokers trade in is much more volatile. It congratulates itself on an audience-defying perversity. Read the list of ingredients: argument, intelligence, spiteful syntax, information overload. A negative dialectic that can live uxoriously with itself, assertive in its modesty. Poetry. An embarrassing word. The project is anachronistic. Well-meaning (but ...”

“... landscape that can be expressed as follows: if you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times. If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world (unless tinpot leftists wreck ...”

“... in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation.’ This time the complimentary comparison was with The Wind in the Willows. Children will be enchanted, but educated adult readers will appreciate the novel’s ...”

“... that cricket writers are short of topics. The merest smidgeon of a smile twitched my lips when I read of the Gatting incident. His team so far have crisscrossed the Australian continent so many times that it is doubtful if their body clocks will ever catch up. What Gatting failed to do was arrive at the ground in time for the start of the match against ...”

“... the rationalisations. This script could certainly have made a good film: it was intended for Richard Lester in 1982, but ‘the finances were never found.’ The other three film scripts have become real movies. One of them, The Comfort of Strangers, is another macabre: it adapts Ian McEwan’s novel about an Italian sadist and his subservient wife ...”

“... laced with menace, but, being slightly deaf, I cannot hear them. I wonder if it helps that I have read the book? In fact, despite my familiarity with Bram Stoker’s masterpiece and my ability to decode the book’s multi-layered subtexts about, among other things, colonialism, sadomasochistic sex, miscegenation and vaccination, I am not doing very well at ...”

“... however. Calasso may move effortlessly from Pol Pot to Goethe, or from discussion of the Vedas to Richard Cobb’s favourite uncle, but in the process he is always rehearsing the same ideas about sacrifice, revolution and modernity. The crucial question is whether the repetition of these ideas in so many different contexts reinforces or diffuses their ...”

“... estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how Coward, then a Swiss national, was found in bed reading the proofs of Sheridan Morley’s A Talent to Amuse (1969). ‘How is it?’ he was asked. ‘I’m afraid Sherry has to do a bit more work,’ was the reply. ‘There are still a few old ladies in ...”

“... myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write.’ Richard Klein, now the celebrated author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, was one of the guys. Approached by Duke for a quote, he wrote: ‘For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy ...”

“... the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles by Herbert Spencer. She had three days to read it, and Spencer’s vision of human evolution towards the Absolute remained with her for a lifetime. At 18 she had a long conversation, which was profoundly important to her, with an African woman. This woman said to her: God cannot be good, otherwise why ...”

“... a serious reader could want: the history is a handbook, something to be consulted rather than read, and it will certainly become a standard work of reference. But it is also much more than a catalogue of ascertained fact and scholarly conjecture. Its various chapters contain criticism and assessment, and they are generously illustrated with ...”

“... out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the fall of a Tory junior minister, Richard Spring, exposed by your old friends at the News of the World for taking part in a three-in-a-bed sex session. This was a political ‘event’ supposedly ‘reported’ by newspapers and television. But the event itself occurred only in order to be ...”

“... she inveighs against a Korean-American psychotherapist who rejects her as a patient, praises Richard Pryor, investigates the rape and murder of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, considers Black-Asian relations and reflects on her immigrant family’s stereotypical embourgeoisement. Better known as a poet (she teaches at Rutgers), here she uses prose to ...”

“... Greece were the two most common foci for this nostalgia, and Lawrence was avid for both. He read Aristophanes in the desert, and his last book was a translation of the Odyssey. But it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with ...”