“... 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 ...”

“... on the first part of this passage ran: ‘This seems to me rather good, considering I had not read a syllable of any book on the subject, but had thought it all out for myself – beyond having just heard that there was a Greatest Happiness Principle, and having wondered why anything so obvious was called a principle, or how any one could dispute it – I ...”

“... proceeds: ‘I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are ...”

“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... on page 7 of Lykiard’s Introduction). Did Ducasse choose the pseudonym? He had certainly read Sue, and Caradec emphasises the appeal of Latréaumont the character (‘a kind of cruel clown, a moral and physical monstrosity’) to the creator of the ‘diabolical’ Maldoror. Or was the name proposed by Lacroix, Sue’s publisher as well as ...”

“... I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas ...”