“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel ...”

“... queen than her grandfather Henry VII; Shakespeare’s first tetralogy moves from Henry VI through Richard III to the arrival of Henry Tudor, who would become Henry VII of England. These plays staged and applauded, Shakespeare turned to a prequel sequence, from Richard II through Henry IV to Henry V. From this a curious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Borrow ... George Eliot, blown heavenward by the trumpets of Leavisite praise, is reverentially read by all. Borrow of the mighty stride – he could cover more than 30 miles a day and always counted on doing the last lap to the pub at six miles an hour – Borrow the mysterious, the adventurous, the polyglot, the pugilist, the dodgy lover has been thrown ...”

“... challenged in Committee about the meaning of the words, and hoping, too, that any explanation was read accurately from the Notes on Clauses and not (as has happened) from the wrong part of a briefing, or from the part headed ‘not to be read out’ (including, on one occasion, the words ‘not to be ...”