“... 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 ...”

“... convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, Peter Walker, was Black and came from the Danish West Indies; her mother, Marie, was a white Danish immigrant. Walker disappeared soon after Nella’s birth. Her mother then married a fellow Danish immigrant who never accepted his mixed-race stepdaughter. Nella ...”

“... These two books are a reminder that architects do usually test their ideas on themselves first. Peter Moro, who worked for Lubetkin’s practice and designed the Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... knowledge’ to work for counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Peter Mandler wants to rescue Mead. His book portrays her as one of the more sympathetic US internationalists. First, she got Americans interested in the far corners of the globe in the early 1940s when, in Mandler’s view, many were inclined to turn their ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... books are sorted out at the discretion of a handful of his peers. It is true that just as people read reviews rather than books, they prefer short reviews to long ones, so the snap judgments of the dailies and Sundays have undue influence. But this doesn’t mean there is no place for serious reviewing. Raban knows what good reviewing is not – its purpose ...”

“... wife and children, and from his jobs. He lived as a hobo, promoted get-rich-quick oil investments, read Karl Marx and dabbled in Wobblie politics. Then he buckled down for a while and worked part of his way through the University of Kansas, where he became the creative writing programme’s star pupil, publishing stories and poems in both the university ...”

“... and women whose errors are liable to multiply with the complexity of the system. How often have we read of a space launch failing despite meticulous servicing because of a trivial fault: how much truer will this be of an entire weapons system left unattended in space? To my mind it is important to make the public and political leaders aware of science’s ...”

“... of Tony Benn. It is true that the record of an internal debate among the committed is not to be read as a prospectus for potential converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, Harold Wilson and the IMF, and the assumption that the answerability of Parliamentary representatives of the Left to a party executive ...”

“... arts’. Yet, when so many solemn novels are prolix, esoteric, or dispiriting, it’s a relief to read eventful tales of suspense, surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and ...”