“... may appear over-ingenious, when stated in this bald way. For it is only in the process of reading that we can take account both of the risk that Pinget runs, and of his success in guarding against it. ‘But the explanations after the event could only diminish, if not reduce to nothing, the importance of the writings in question,’ reads the ...”

“... the group, developed a love-hate relationship with it wrote papers on it which became required reading inside the group, and above all, worked endless hours building an electronic storehouse of Orwellian proportions. The BKA’s staff was doubled to 3536, its budget quintupled, and it assembled computer files on 4.7 million people and 3100 ...”

“... whom Vico credited with providing this information. In this case as in many others, Vico’s reading of an ancient text was less philological than imaginative. In the Germania, a short, vivid description of the country and customs of the ancient Germans, Tacitus noted that their towns, unlike Roman cities, did not consist of blocks of houses in the midst ...”

“... and his father, whose hair ‘stuck up at the back, just as Harry’s did’). And where both Peter Pan and Mary Poppins taught children to fly or float by thinking happy thoughts, Rowling takes the concept into a more sinister area. Harry learns that the only way to defend himself against the Dementors, who will destroy him by assuming the form of what ...”

“... out in her excellent Editing Emily Dickinson (2008), to edit Dickinson is to offer a critical reading that is inevitably shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of ...”

“... by press photographers. In school, he did well in science but was bored by most of the assigned reading, and his prospects for college were sunk by a cumulative average of 67. The disappointment mattered less than it might have done: by his senior year, Kubrick had begun placing photographs in Look magazine. A regular position there would support him over ...”

“... well-known personalities from history, like Robespierre or Thomas Cromwell). You might start reading Bedford for the food and the celebrity gossip, but you reread for the thrilling materiality, ‘concrete and fastidious’, as she herself once suggested, of her prose: odd, elaborate framings and risky hanging slabs of dialogue; locutions that started ...”

“... work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South things.’ This is October 1967. I can’t see how Flannery O’Connor (which he perhaps thought was a pen name) could be so easily dismissed by someone ...”

“... put all that fornication and eloquent embroidery to industrious use. His two favourite pastimes, reading Protestant theologians and periscoping other men’s wives, huddled under one roof in his breakthrough novel, Couples (1968), the book that boosted Updike into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his ...”

“... Go away a little closer, Idiot Boy. I’ve got all the recent books on the subject. But reading books – and there have been droves over the past decade – seems only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy catalogue published to coincide with a major show of Outsider Art at the Berkeley Art Museum this spring. However beautifully put ...”

“... to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes for interesting reading today. It appeared less than two years after Sputnik I had been launched, and combined hard-headed calculation with an almost giddy optimism, the ‘can-do’ and ‘gee-whiz’ spirit that marked the early years of the space age. Why look for signals ...”

“... in the US than at home, and America didn’t live up to the image he’d formed during years of reading Hemingway and Dos Passos. He was disgusted by pressure from anti-Soviet groups to exaggerate his suffering in Russia, and disinclined to become a professional émigré dissident. But in New York his career took off. A kind-hearted Slavicist volunteered to ...”

“... assumptions, shared with my family, that equated cleverness with curiosity, politeness and the reading of books. As my father often said of people who might be envied for their bigger wages or pretensions: ‘Aye, but do they have books in the house?’We had books in the house – a bookcase full of them, and more in a bedroom cupboard. Nobody else in my ...”

“... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...”