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“... painted that picture in Milan, Vilhelm Hammershøi, in Copenhagen, painted a picture called Woman Reading in Sunlight, Strandgade 30. The room where she sits, with her back to you, was in Hammershøi’s apartment. The sun shines through the fabric of looped-back curtains. The bright patches of light on the floor are shaped by the window she faces. These more ...”

“... the ghouls in a horror movie, are now less a real fear than a safe thrill. Contrast those with a reading of Moctezuma’s coronation stone. It is a rectangular slab of basalt, carved in low relief on all six sides. In the exhibition it stands on its side; originally it was probably laid flat on the ground, so the rabbit with improbably large Bugs Bunny teeth ...”

“... which shows poor boys being charitably fitted out for the Navy – encourages you to find your own reading and to think about street children then and now. Stand Coachman, or the Haughty Lady Well Fitted shows what is said to be a true incident. A lady refused to move her coach which was blocking the path, so a man opened the door, climbed in and made his way ...”

“... anything but traditional contours. Consistent with her brains and her aspirations, she founded a reading society that was the prototype of her later salon. Then, at the age of 34, she met Friedrich Schlegel and promptly fell in love with the brilliant young critic. Only one road seemed open to this free spirit: she deserted and soon divorced her husband. For ...”

“... whole sets of publishers’ records. Meanwhile libraries – notably that of the University of Reading – systematically acquired and sorted publishers’ archives. But we still lack anything comparable to the German Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens. Nor does Britain have an equivalent to John Tebbel’s multivolume history of American ...”

“... values of the ear (the book, he remarks in the Phaedrus, is not interactive) – the culture of reading can be seen, even in the fifth century, as a fad of the avant-garde. This did not stop the IT revolution consolidating itself; books, as well as beds, were soon being exported as far as the remote and isolated colonies of the Black Sea. And yet the book ...”

“... Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage illustrations – much of what is here was written while Carrington and Ernst ...”

“... He later produced a little series of Fabian tracts which incorporated his wide if ill-digested reading. The early years of the Seventies saw the flowering of the year ’68 in England – behind the times as usual. That was the period of Benn’s conversion, a conversion finalised by the crisis of conscience experienced with the collapse of Upper Clyde ...”

“... did not fit into traditional pigeon-holes must be up to no good. The same idea seems to underlie Peter Abelard’s bold attempt, discussed by Le Goff in another essay, to assimilate university teachers to knights, describing arguments as weapons and disputations as battles or tournaments. He was trying to legitimate his own profession and incidentally to ...”

“... at Clifton is a charming charade. When the girls are not quietly occupied in their rooms – Aleph reading Scott, Sefton deep in Thucydides, and Moy painting fey pictures or shifting her stones around by telekinesis or shepherding an insect to the safety of the outdoors – they are mostly to be found in the Aviary singing madrigals or old-fashioned ...”

“... and very difficult to interpret’. A new translation can offer no more than one scholar’s reading (to a great extent arbitrary) of other scholars’ editions. Sappho’s Aeolic Greek is extraordinarily difficult, and establishing the texts of her poems – especially those reconstructed from lacuna-ridden and often near illegible scraps of papyrus ...”

“... the man, his work and his audience. The dim figure of Walsh’s Introduction, with his limited reading and borrowed quotations, is no more plausible than the splendid author of the source-book read by troubadours in the moonlight and by aristocrats in the bath. Andreas was writing neither for the lay aristocracy, whose interest in his work has never been ...”

“... Hiaasen writes a twice-weekly newspaper column. This may explain the unliterary speed of his quick-reading prose, and the smart repartee. It may also explain the production-line quality of Hiaasen plots. Among the regular components are a major villain to scale up the action. In Native Tongue it is Francis X. Kingsbury, aka Frankie King, mobster, property ...”

“... the specialist and reserve collections they need, or to those who would rather their additional reading came on a page not on a label.* The explanatory mode comes into its own when curiosity overtakes you on the hoof – as it often does. How did the bedding on the Great Bed of Ware feel? Here are some samples of kapok etc to handle. How do you tell a ...”

“... just the enlightening information you want. I have never before seen people spend so much time reading about what they are looking at. Kounellis has made things that invite attention in a way that would make commentary an intrusion. His room of steel plates, resting on chairs, with regular arrays of lumps of coal fastened onto them with wires; the column ...”