“... 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 ...”

“... before the scent has evaporated.’ Such hyperbole helped to ensure that the novels were widely read and relished. East Lynne was the most fashionable of all. Its publishers, who had little reason to take the cavils of reviewers seriously, claimed 500,000 sales by 1900. It was the talk of the day soon after its appearance in 1861, and though the literary ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’s development in the Twenties; being a tireless worker, he was prepared to read through quantities of indigestible Soviet material to the end of his life. Regularly, despite his age, the volumes succeeded each other. Carr brought many gifts to the study of Russia. He could handle many languages, and his training as a Classical scholar ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... the ‘Hieroglyphicks’ they invented. There’s a reason, to put it another way, that we still read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George ...”

“... in about 1742, and was brought to England in 1750 by his first master, or ‘owner’, Colonel Richard Bathurst. He was probably baptised in England, though no record of this has been found. At Orange River, the sugar plantation where he spent his childhood, he was called Quashey, a very common slave name which he exchanged for a very ordinary-sounding ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”