“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had effectively exploited the so-called missile gap for his own electoral purposes, Ellsberg read a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the subject and discovered that it had all been a lie: there was a gap but it was ten to one in favour of the US. This, he said, had ‘a shocking effect on my professional worldview’. There were ...”

“... in Italy and educated by her aunt in an English country house, she was given pious tracts to read, learned some algebra and embroidered a shepherdess who was         lovelorn with pink eyes To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell Which slew the tragic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... compassionate man and an incomparable friend. I first met him late in Michaelmas term 1957. I had read history at Exeter College and in Final Schools the previous term rather to my own surprise (and very much to the surprise of my college) had just scraped into the first class. So instead of being thrust out into the world as I had expected I was offered the ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... on their foreign debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair, Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines, planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a huge share swap, in essence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”