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“... 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 ...”

“... published by Archibald Keppel Cameron Cresswell (1879-1974). On the back of its dust-jacket, Richard Bulliet, a leading American historian of medieval Islam, describes Hillenbrand’s work as ‘the first absolutely essential book on Islamic architecture since Cresswell’. This is no overstatement. Cumulatively, the selection of buildings discussed in ...”

“... well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that he has the skill, rare in these and most other times, to ...”

“... detail and said she lied to keep things interesting. It doesn’t help that her childhood memories read like news stories. Did she really stand by the railway tracks as trains passed on their way to the camps and villagers tried to offer water and food? Was she raped at thirteen in occupied Berlin by an American soldier, who was then court-martialled and ...”

“... Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became Auden’s secretary) and to two other volunteers, women who had preserved their notes from the spring ...”

“... in wars; the country diaries of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ...”

“... travelling over the sea, Smutty streets and factory lanes – What can these ever mean to me?If we read the last line not as a dismissal of the world beyond the windowpane but as anxiousness and curiosity about it, it becomes a different poem – more of a strained confessional than superior musings from a luxury liner. Cunard’s father, Sir Bache Cunard, was ...”

“... and Diane Dillon, a cover so beautiful it stayed on the eye and swam over the yellowing pages. I read it till the spine cracked and never returned it; it is next to me right now. I only stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a jeweller who ...”

“... with whom he had entered into a dynastic marriage three years earlier. It isn’t hard to read into Mytens’s portrait the clinginess of a man whose pride could not compensate for a painful lack of inner resources. By the same token, it isn’t hard to imagine why such a patron might wish for a less prosaic holder-up of the mirror. Adjacent to the ...”

“... of new friends, most of them thirty or forty years older than him. He taught himself openings, read books about endgames, sharpened his play with puzzle drills and repeatedly watched a documentary about Magnus Carlsen. One scene stuck with him: in 2013, a blindfolded Carlsen took on ten Harvard-educated lawyers (and amateur chess ...”

“... I see an old film on the TV screen I look up his entries on the director and stars; I have thus read many of those profiles dozens of times without wearying of them. If I were not indulged in my choice of ‘luxury item’, then Thomson would be my consolation for having no access to films. I am saying, then, that Thomson’s criticism is both highly ...”

“... Thus, his reading experience is closer to that of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who also read the plays in what was, for them, a modern form. We plan both a new single-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works for the Oxford Standard Authors (OSA) series, and a detailed scholarly edition, devoting a volume to each play, for the Oxford English Texts ...”