“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a war never fight for even a minute.’ Jarrell later attacked Auden for recommending that parents read Grimms’ Fairy Tales to their children, the better to banish such bogeys as, in Auden’s words, ‘the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Co-operative Camp for ...”

“... unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which is the most narrative book, you could read pretty much anywhere.’ In other words, you could make your own ...”

“... of Blacks in the military, spent part of the war teaching draftees, mostly from the South, to read and write. I still remember his pleasure after the war at receiving letters from former students thanking him for the difference literacy had made in their lives.)It didn’t take long for the Roosevelt administration to recognise the absurdity of turning ...”

“... or closed-ness, the drama has drifted away. Ginsberg says that his Collected Poems ‘may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves’. But this is disingenuous. He is a very literary poet, even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never ...”

“... time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a café in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a ‘Narcissus’ and probably a ‘bugger’. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the ...”

“... in defence of execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden – unlawful fleshlinesse ... ’ Richard Barnfield, after allowing a lovesick Arcadian to pour out his passion for ‘Ganymede’ in The Affectionate Shepherd, took refuge somewhat disingenuously in the explanation that the poem was ‘nothing else but an imitation of Vergil in the second ...”

“... Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly elegiac mood: death can’t be all that bad if it gets ...”

“... to which television values have penetrated British politics. It would, however, be misleading to read the British experience as simply the American one with a time-lag. For there are two strands in our island story. One is the increasing sophistication of politicians and party machines in using television for propaganda purposes. The other is the problematic ...”

“... private sessions. Yet this is a remarkable document and no historian of economic theory can read it without excitement. Nothing else better illustrates Keynes’s intellectual and rhetorical qualities, nor his capacity to dominate an argument and suborn his colleagues, even those who had no intention of being suborned. (But they also illustrate the ...”

“... and when, in her late middle age, her granddaughter tried, unsuccessfully, to teach her to read, she wept with frustration and shame. Mary Ann Reed had a remarkable memory, however, and a well-stocked repertoire of fairy-stories – told with great verve – and songs to enchant her children and grandchild. A daughter, Gladys, born in 1908, was ...”

“... wife to any husband. The book, though physically attractive and lavishly illustrated, is a hard read. What is it that keeps one going through a long sequence of letters with their arbitrary reference to time and place and their detailed personal content? Usually their literary value and/or narrative arrangement. Vera Stravinsky’s letters have more of the ...”