“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”