“... 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 ...”

“... named Mr Watts (though known in mockery of his eccentricities as ‘Pop Eye’) begins to read Great Expectations (or something that passes for Great Expectations) aloud. His audience consists of the black children of the island, whose schoolmasters, together with the rest of the white population, have fled. The children’s parents hope that Pop ...”

“... Miller was at the time himself at a moment of transition, moving towards deconstruction. He read the poem as Wordsworth’s undermining of the naturalistic assumption that we can see the world without or before the cultural languages that shape it for us. ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill’: in these ...”

“... Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and the ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Human Life (2017) were all bestsellers.Some of this excitement is a result of advances in our understanding, and in the technologies that now capture the lives of animals with unprecedented ...”

“... love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone’s and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the Folio Society and ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”