“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by students in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading and published by the department’s press, Whiteknights; it is now reissued as a joint venture by Whiteknights and Bloodaxe. Pound always rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn ...”

“... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not be kept from the world and a manuscript was sent to their friend Mary Russell Mitford in Reading with instructions to print a very limited number of copies. These slim volumes, bearing the title Sonnets by E.B.B., then seem to have disappeared from view, parcelled up with some of Mitford’s other books and papers at her death before making their way ...”