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“... from the dead. Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with ...”

“... a 1970s TV comedy star, and there’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the barn; in Spring, Richard makes TV documentaries; and the slow-dreaming, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (whom we first met in Autumn and who returns in Summer – a man for all seasons) awakes from his reveries and returns to the present when he hears a song he wrote playing on the TV ...”

“... But above all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was ...”

“... and found he was good at it, meticulous and with a keen eye for detail. Working with the printer Richard Clay and Sons, he was able to match all details of the original pamphlets, with the exception of the paper stock. His versions, he boasted, were ‘as exact a representation as it has been found possible’, with each ‘printer’s error, dropped letter ...”

“... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...”

“... in Beijing offer only grossly biased accounts of ‘the Beijing turmoil’, at least few read them and fewer still believe them: the Chinese press is government-controlled. Western accounts of ‘the Tiananmen massacre’ are also biased and even more inaccurate, but many read them and most believe them: the ...”

“... are the most significant to survive, should be her memorial and that their meaning was to be read in their fabric. The decades after Losh’s death were a low point for English biography, in which lives of ‘great men’ dominated a mostly barren field. Nevertheless, in 1873 Losh’s much younger friend, a Carlisle doctor called Henry Lonsdale, who had ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... to ensure Harington’s significance, if not his fame, the manuscript from which the printer Richard Field set Harington’s translation of Ariosto survives in the British Library: it tells us more about the ways in which Elizabethan printers regularised authors’ spelling and punctuation than any other document from the period. When Harington’s ...”

“... by Al Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the ...”

“... producer with ‘sadistic’ sexual inclinations, had an ‘incandescent’ affair with a pre-Liz Richard Burton and flirted with Elvis Presley, she might be thought to have quite a lot to offer on the carnal gossip front. But if public notice has seemed to neglect this promising material, it is largely because Bloom shows so little interest in it ...”

“... distinctive style: though he takes for granted that his readers know the rules, his book could be read with enjoyment by those who have never played. It is occasionally disfigured by grammatical errors, such as ‘who he wished to be monks’, ‘like del Rio ... did’ and ‘having said this, it is necessary ...’, and by the misuse of ‘parameter’ with ...”

“... It was the name of the lady principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Daphne Park, who has, we read here, a history of an elusive kind in Zambia and the Congo. One or two of the other names on the list I had already come across personally, in a similarly disconcerting way. I remember rather excitedly mentioning to a senior journalist on the Observer that I ...”

“... clear, the Scots, Irish and Welsh. This means that when he speaks of the British Empire, we should read ‘English’. His own Murray forebears, being however far back Gaelic-speaking Scots, are largely if not entirely exempt from blame for what has happened to the Aborigines. (These latter, of course, are the black allies he speaks of, tenderly, always and ...”

“... as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard Chandler wrote in the journals he published a decade after their return to England, ‘several of the Turks murmured, and some threatened, because he overlooked their houses; obliging them to confine or remove the women, to prevent their being seen from ...”