“... than scholar’, classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... a grasp of the whole, an eye for detail, and a sense of irony and wit that make them a pleasure to read. For histories of histories, time itself is capacious. Grafton’s practitioners were writing in the decades around 1600; he can treat them as mutually curious contemporaries. Burrow’s stretch across two and a half thousand years, but until 1700 or so, his ...”

“... and here and in A Modern Utopia (1905) Wells was conscious of his debt to Plato, whom he had first read as a teenager. He found Plato’s eugenics intellectually attractive, but soon began to doubt the scientific claims of Galton and Pearson. In 1903 he outspokenly condemned eugenic measures as wholly impractical (though not, G.K. Chesterton pointed out, as ...”

“... Truth that life illustrates to the life that embodies truth. The Pilgrim’s Progress, however, is read at length and with extraordinary consistency as a literal narrative that subverts the intended allegory and relates the ‘rise of the new gentility ... from common labourer ... to Whitehall courtier’. The admission that this is a wilful misreading ...”

“... understanding of the problems at stake. To alleviate her personal grief, Margot volunteered to read aloud to the female employees at Clifford’s Box factory in Whitechapel during their lunch breaks ‘three days a week when she was in London’. As frequently as she could manage, though, she was away from the metropolis, at her father’s Scottish ...”

“... here. Dr McKitterick remains firmly earthbound. Sometimes this can be useful. It is refreshing to read about Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome without being weighed down by debates on the massive, if nebulous significance of this for the future, but her refusal to accord any real significance to contemporary imperial ideology means that her account of ...”

“... reputation’. She was a widow in her thirties, already famous as the author of that rumbustious, read-on yet delicate novel The Tale of Genji, when she joined the entourage of the Emperor’s daughter in the combined capacities of lady-in-waiting and literary lion. Her Diary of (chiefly) court life is, Mr Bowring considers, more probably a reconstruction in ...”

“... It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social democracy, the conversation must have rattled along. (Goldsmith, says ...”

“... I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time was Hecht’s account of his period as a Zionist activist in the 1940s (this, or at least his attitude towards British control of Palestine, had made him unpopular in ...”

“... as evidently happened to lots of people, with the excitements of early adolescence. A friend who read it at 14 got so carried away by its hormonally atmospheric, audience-flattering schtick that she can’t speak about it now, she says, without a shiver of embarrassment. That seems better to me than my own response, which was to feel smug about having ...”

“... and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges. Someone had read one of those novels long ago but couldn’t remember anything about it. In the context of all that forgetting, this biography of Pamela Hansford Johnson reads as a meditation on time and fame and oblivion. It isn’t meant to be anything so subtle. It’s ...”

“... wars. Postmodernists found it masculine, universalist and Eurocentric; fiscal conservatives read its texts selectively, finding value in Locke on government, or praising the free market philosophy of Adam Smith. Those were the days (to paraphrase Todd Gitlin) when the right got the White House and the left got the English departments, where the ...”

“... but never before visited; and when the narrative seems to stumble on somewhere that had only been read or dreamed about, the book pulls off very successfully the ideological trick of the materialisation of myth. Time and again, as if by chance, the narrator comes across a scene which is the living embodiment of a legend, or an individual who is the ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”