“... might even say that no other English critic except possibly Coleridge has had his ideas and his reading more intensely studied. The reason for all this activity isn’t merely that there are so many more aspirants looking for something interesting to investigate, though that is not wholly irrelevant. It may be true that too much has been written and ...”

“... parts to the session. First, the poet would read his or her poems aloud, and we would discuss the reading simply as a reading, without going too far into the substance of the poems: ‘Why did you pause before that particular word?’ or ‘You don’t seem to wish to emphasise the line endings – is this because you feel ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... stylist and, lately, something of a spirit guide for Elvis. Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the ...”

“... have worked on Greek tragedy over the past generation. The biggest problem with Mulroy’s reading of Aeschylus is not that it is sexist, outdated in its language, politically regressive, and uninformed by current scholarship, but that he seems to have no interest in asking probing questions of the text he claims to champion. Monumentalising is offered ...”

“... in the British Year Book of International Law, Vol. 9, 1928, at first appeared winded (Peter Beck, Guardian, 26 July, has since I wrote this revealed that the review was a Foreign Office plant and that ‘C.D.’ was Sir Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on ...”

“... eight of fiction, 16 historical novellas, twenty-odd plays, and much more work in progress. Reading conditions were not favourable that night and by morning virtually the whole oeuvre had been destroyed. For the remaining 25 years of Sade’s life there was one loss that he mourned more bitterly than the rest. This manuscript – which he had been ...”

“... of whites as yet unborn. Greenblatt applies this model of subversion as consolidation to a reading of the second tetralogy, and his analysis is echoed by several contributors to both volumes, who reject both the Tillyardian reading and its liberal inversion. A similar pattern of subversion and ultimate containment is ...”

“... and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.’ Faulkner reread it every year. Joyce talked about its ‘unforgettable scenes … Madness, you may call it’ – but that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number ...”

“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... individualised – seeing, for example, the natural refinement of Bob, and his old fondness for reading history books, through Ella’s hopelessly devoted gaze. There is no sense of ‘waste’ in all this. Hamilton became a Marxist, like many writers of the time, and the need for something to believe in can be felt in the background of his literary ...”

“... There are no quick third ways, rehabilitations and smart sideways leaps, and this makes them worth reading. The authors recognise the deep-seated errors of all the left-wing utopias that preceded the ascent of neoconservatism and insist that the latter’s victory wasn’t accidental, or avoidable. As a result, a much longer-range search is required for any ...”

“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narrative, and there’s no shortage of first-person writing here, but little autobiography in conventional terms: ‘My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Haemoglobin ...”

“... Osolinski, Chlaus Lotscher. Wonderful names, evocative names. Columns of them. Rolling credits reading like some disconcertingly sensuous concrete poem. The colour shots are very striking, in a Tokyo-printed, fat-magazine kind of way; that slightly self-conscious excellence of serious investment lurking behind a noble topic ...”