“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years old. What would/ should/do you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it ...”

“... 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 ...”