“... worked well in the same place; cut down two firs – we’re nearly up to sixty sawed-up trees.’ Read closely, though, the documents of the Imperial family are in many instances quietly touching. Nicholas and Alexandra were clearly bewildered that their good intentions went so completely awry, and they brought a naive but staunch dignity to their loss of ...”

“... embassies in the 1690s, became a bestseller, cited by Kant and Goethe. Later accounts by Carl Peter Thunberg and Phillip Franz von Siebold kept curiosity alive. But since no one else could go, Westerners continued to depend on sources that were decades out of date. Then, just as Edo opened its doors, it changed its name and began a rapid transformation ...”

“... or on the radio, for which he was a regular conductor and occasional speaker. Or you might have read his music criticism in the New Statesman or the Sunday Referee. Like many of my generation, I first encountered him in his wonderfully perverse and entertaining 1930s book on modern music, Music Ho!, with its provocative subtitle: ‘A Study of Music in ...”

“... a long backstory, much of it chronicled three years ago by the leading journalist of the Troubles, Peter Taylor, in Talking to Terrorists (yes, Jonathan Powell lifted someone else’s title). There had been intermittent contact between the British government and the IRA throughout the Troubles. Having explored a number of channels of communication, the British ...”

“... loose with the dates and the references, claiming for example to have conducted an interview with Peter Lawford, the English actor and member of the rat pack, on a date some time after his death. Kelley is not just mean, or dangerous: she has a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favourite Oprah ...”

“... self-serving memoirs of Blunt’s NKVD contact Yuri Modin and the grievance-twisted outpourings of Peter Wright, is exceedingly judicious. Indeed, the book can be read not only as a biography but as an exemplary account of the unreliability of interested witnesses.Blunt’s friendship with the talented artist Eric Hebborn is ...”

“... this time, so hard my fingers slip off and jab his pulpy, wet palate. He bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no ...”

“... party specifically committed to it was reduced to 1.2 per cent of the vote and the papers we read at home debated what room there was in politics for its supporters. It was also Hitler who produced the community of refugees who came to play a disproportionately prominent part in their countries of refuge and to whom Weimar’s memory owes so ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... admired by C.S. Peirce, and more recently by Roderick Chisholm and Keith Lehrer. G.E. Moore read him, learnt from him, quoted him in his early work and then forgot the debt, while transmitting some of his ideas to Wittgenstein. Gareth Evans was a forceful advocate of his views. But today he is known to most analytical philosophers only for one obvious ...”

“... at UCLA, I was told it was years since one had been given. A senior colleague told me he had never read Spinoza, but knew he could not be all bad since he had been expelled from the Amsterdam Synagogue. This attitude is now dated. We have recently been getting much new information about Spinoza’s background, the context in which he worked out his ...”

“... And take heart. It would be a great pity if, nowadays, Beckett had become more celebrated than read, or if the classic status of the early work had blinded us to the evidence of his continuing achievement. Worstward Ho enables us to enter, once again, the circulating mobile of his fictional world, and to follow the still enthralling adventures of the lone ...”

“... with vivid interest, gets home at midnight, refuses to go to bed until 1.30 or 2 because he must read ... seven days he does this, the eighth day he perishes in his tracks ... Girl, what a life! But what fun! Blake was, or would become, banker, economic theorist, teacher, historical novelist. But it was the energy of her ‘small Vesuvius’, his charm, his ...”

“... that the artists are proud of their deficiency, but this is seldom so. It’s easy, if you can read, to brush up your Shakespeare, but not so easy to use your spare half-hours to catch up on the inorganic chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t ...”

“... us that Pamela is frozen, letting her master take over from her. The very text that we have just read has already been through his hands. There are many more alterations in the three paragraphs of this one letter, almost all small ones calculated to rescue Pamela from stylistic inelegance. Between the Oxford and Penguin texts as a whole, there are thousands ...”