“... a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the great burden of reading placed upon them, it must be the case that most of the hundred or so novels submitted can be discarded pretty quickly. I was going to say after twenty pages, until I remembered the case of a Booker judge a few years ago who was doing some early winnowing ...”

“... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... Let me defer here to Adolph Reed, who is emerging as one of the few black American essayists worth reading in a period of intensifying racism and of stultifying parochial loyalties, and who never lets the pressure of the first move him an inch nearer to the second: Early in the saga, there was considerable evidence of multiracial fan support for O.J., as ...”

“... reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our meetings.’ But the idyll is not perfect. Hanna is subject to unpredictable fits of pique and fury; once she strikes Michael ...”

“... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...”

“... Reviews of Modern Physics. There have always been two traditions in metaphysics, characterised by Peter Strawson as ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’. Descriptive metaphysics seeks to uncover how we do, or more ambitiously must, conceptualise the world we find ourselves in. Revisionary metaphysics seeks, by contrast, to show that our ordinary thinking ...”

“... the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate as to what ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... for they couldn’t draw on the social knowledge that tells them which authors are worth reading and which are cranks, whose results can be relied on and whose should be viewed with suspicion. They could not invoke the essentially social trust – a major focus of Shapin’s work – that allows them to be confident that what is in the bottle ...”

“... between Culture and System’, and argues both that ‘there is obviously no substitute for reading well’ and that ‘criticism cannot assume its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text.’ Meanwhile Edward had begun to write more directly political and polemic books: The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... but exhilarating game that made her work effective. To play with or against Sontag, simply by reading her essays, was to apprehend that if you felt strongly enough, if you felt intimations of grace, called yourself one of art’s elect, then she would let you in on certain secrets: whom to read, how to gaze, what else there was to learn. Those who ...”