“... just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA certificate, from which I learned, incidentally, that it was introduced in July 1970 and dropped in September 1982 to make way for the 15 certificate still in use ...”

“... Manson, incidentally, were both made to attend their first day at school dressed as girls.) To read up on serial murders is to sup full of horrors, and also to sup full of explanations. ‘Psychopathic dissociation’, acute, chronic and paranoid schizophrenia, ‘disorders of the hypothalmus’, ‘organic dysfunctions, psychopathological behaviour and ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... from the dead. Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with ...”

“... Bletchley from Donald Michie, Professor of Robotology at Edinburgh University. Three years later I read Angus Calder’s The People’s War, a social history of World War Two, and resolved to write something one day about the war. I come from an Army background, and although I was born three years after the war ended, it was a living presence throughout my ...”

“... is the inspiration for the married woman Félix loves, the countess Henriette de Mortsauf. Balzac read his novel to de Berny shortly before her death – and, like Félix, he wrote about their relationship in a long letter, in his case to the woman he would marry, Eveline Hańska. De Berny described the book as sublime, but suggested he temper some of Madame ...”

“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On ...”

“... towards Darwinism and the science’s wider nationalistic uses. Uses have never been central to Peter Bowler’s work: indeed, in the past he has had a bone to pick with Edinburgh sociologists who promoted an instrumental approach to science. Nonetheless in his sturdy account of Theories of Human Evolution he, too, looks at the wider cultural and racial ...”

“... for all that discrepant genes may turn out to be equally implicated in all of them. People don’t read case-studies of diabetes in the hope of gaining some insight into the nature of man’s relationship with the world, even though extreme physical illness and pain may be quite as tumultuous and alienating to the individual as mental disturbance. Madness has ...”

“... poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and Gunn’s ‘On the Move’ in O’Brien) is to see how the Movement contains the germ of its own undoing in these restless and questing poets. In fact, the ...”

“... the pages to find further references. Try ‘Cary Grant’ and see if you can manage not to read about Hawks, Hitchcock, Hepburn, Mae West, Capra; except that having got to the Hawks entry, you are deflected on to Elisha Cook, Montgomery Clift, Boris Karloff, and each of those will send you off on another mystery tour … I have spent whole days leafing ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... however, as one of the few prominent Pop and high-tech buildings to see the light of day, it was read as a manifesto. First, it made clear the renewed importance of innovative engineering for contemporary architecture (Rogers and Piano were assisted by the great engineer Peter Rice, who often consulted for RRP ...”

“... narrative voice that passes no judgment on grotesque characters and events. Novels, for those who read them (always a minority), often provide a form of ethical companionship. Bainbridge never signed up to this agenda. The Bottle Factory Outing would be less disturbing if there was the filter of authorial judgment. Instead, there’s just the spiky dissonance ...”

“... the person of a king?’ ‘The King himself.’ To this extent, Prince Hal’s profligacy can be read as the son throwing the father’s imposture back in his face. The Donmar production wasn’t ‘giving the lie’ to the idea that this is a masculine play, as one reviewer suggested, or shifting the emphasis to the ‘similarity between the sexes’. In ...”