“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”

“... does not even realise it rhymes.I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of ...”

“... forms, it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original. Those who fancied themselves as scholars could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only ...”

“... show how durable that change has been, he could have pointed to today’s exemplars of this ideal: Richard Layard’s Wellbeing Programme at the LSE, for instance, which makes the case for measuring national happiness alongside calculations of GDP.National happiness, of course, is a difficult thing to recognise, let alone measure, and it isn’t always clear ...”

“... actual, literal conditions of their existence’.It’s all very meta, like Vito Acconci’s ‘[READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD]’ (1969), a text that comprises nothing more than a series of step-by-step instructions for reading it. Or Dan Graham’s ‘Poem’, first published in 1966-67 in the art magazine ...”

“... to be sceptical, although, in his brief and sensible treatise on English prose style, Herbert Read very pertinently enquired if anyone had actually seen those ‘tongues’. They were lying tongues no doubt, however dumb. But Kipling knew how eloquent they would be, and brazenly classed them with the good journalist’s passion for fact, for ‘the ...”

“... sometimes confess themselves bewildered or repelled by the inclusion of jokes in papers read to learned societies. The 17th century, however, presents the problem in an especially acute form, which becomes most intractable precisely at the point at which we find ourselves no longer able to say: ‘This is clearly satire.’ The learned style of high ...”

“... public role of their menfolk, women from precisely these social backgrounds were being urged to read about the public past of the nations in which they lived. Moreover – and as in Austen’s case – a minority of women were beginning to write history, not women’s history, but something which, in the circumstances, was far more challenging. Mercy Otis ...”

“... hone the epistolary skills so essential to diplomacy and the cultivation of friendship. He should read and reread the letters of Cicero, translate them into another language, then back into Latin, then check how close he had come to the original. He should study the letters of stylish contemporaries such as Languet’s friend the historian and spy Pietro ...”

“... Anyone who has ever settled down to read The Holy Bible in Pitman’s Shorthand, or even Three Men in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century ...”

“... I read star biographies to find out how stars see themselves and how they see each other. Though I am interested in their behaviour, I am more interested in the curves and austerities of their cognition. Huge gulfs divide a star in daily life from a star on screen; the style in which a star executes an action (film role, household chore, errand, ambassadorial mission) is not the style in which she secretly contemplates her colleagues ...”

“... Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He invented blank verse, as well as the ‘Shakespearean’ form of the sonnet. His poems habitually dwell on isolation: they adopt the voices of Petrarchan lovers brooding on an inner hurt, prisoners lamenting past happiness, or psalmists threatening destruction to their enemies ...”

“... church language anywhere else, not in the pub or the street, unless they were godly people who read the Bible at home, in William Tyndale’s translation, which practically invented what we regard as standard 16th-century-speak. The most we can claim for Tyndale, and for Cranmer, is that Bibles and Prayer Books made more extensive the bilingualism which ...”

“... degree advantageous. I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice.’ Boswell recounts how the young Johnson alighted on a folio edition of Petrarch while hunting for some apples his younger brother, Nathaniel, had hidden on a shelf. By the time he arrived in 1728 to study at Pembroke College, Oxford, Johnson ...”

“... designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite ...”