“... The inevitable drawback is that his version is much bulkier than its predecessor, and difficult to read without a book stand, but it is worth the effort because it opens up huge and important vistas of social and economic history embodied in a built environment, now fully peopled with patrons, craftsmen, builders and the bulk of the ordinary population. This ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... than any of this was the fact that I found it very difficult to concentrate: when I tried to read, or to listen to the radio, I often couldn’t keep the meanings of the words in my mind for long enough to make sense of a sentence. Unless they’ve known someone with the condition, most people wouldn’t recognise these as symptoms of what one consultant ...”

“... with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’ – but also over the blunter evocation of Richard Hoggart as ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’. Our Age had its traditions, ‘was a gentleman’, as Kermode says, and pretty much ran the whole show, ‘being powerful yet negligent’. Our Age also turned out to be rather keener on Margaret ...”

“... getting access to them is difficult and expensive. Once upon a time, so we’re told, all scholars read, wrote and spoke Latin. It was an ideal learned language because in one sense everybody spoke it, and in another scarcely anyone did. Originally the native tongue of a small area around Rome called Latium, Latin enjoyed its scholarly Golden Age in the ...”

“... is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from ...”

“... thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ever. While this vast hoard offers scholars all sorts of opportunities, the problem for most common readers is to work out what that word ‘Eliot’ now ...”

“... The Club Dumas, to welcome the devil as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the formidably intelligent works of Javier Marías, expert in what he calls the ‘shadows’ of the untold story. He is the author of eight novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and ...”

“... of the Party held a hearing on the affair; Lakatos’s expulsion and arrest followed. Or so we read here. There is another possible reason for Lakatos’s arrest, one that is stated in ‘Lakatos in Hungary’, but not here. He may have been in charge of preparing the show trial of a senior member of the Party. When that project was abandoned on orders ...”

“... to Gosse in 1909, ‘I cannot see how details of one’s personal history, when certain books were read, &c, can be required for any legitimate literary criticism.’ Yet the letters do add a dimension to our reading of Hardy. He comes out so plainly as the tenacious, self-interested Dorset man of modest station, more or less self-educated, determined to keep ...”

“... associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the appendixed lists of club committee-members, tabulated on an annual basis. An ex-Junior Treasurer or Falconer from the late ...”

“... meaningful. That painters in Flanders did sometimes intend elements in their work to be read symbolically is not in doubt. Thus when Jan van Eyck showed a Virgin of superhuman scale, almost touching the roof of a lofty church, he was obviously drawing the familiar parallel between Mary and the Church itself. Again, when the room of the Virgin ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”

“... He did not give a damn about anything except zapping Communists. Nor did his chief supporter, Richard Perle, nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’, for his single-minded obsession with avenging his ancestors for what the Russian Reds did to them. Perle’s high moral tone reached its zenith when he recommended arms purchases from an Israeli firm which had ...”

“... of detailed information while seeming to represent each essay as a short story. His writing can be read as an attempt to close the gap between historical scholarship and belles-lettres. Haskell, however, can seem unwilling to contemplate the fact that at some point the narrative must stop, if a piece of writing is to become the ‘essay’ he claims it to ...”