“... at Clifton is a charming charade. When the girls are not quietly occupied in their rooms – Aleph reading Scott, Sefton deep in Thucydides, and Moy painting fey pictures or shifting her stones around by telekinesis or shepherding an insect to the safety of the outdoors – they are mostly to be found in the Aviary singing madrigals or old-fashioned ...”

“... The Austrian writer Peter Handke is so successful and so prolific that, reviewing one of his recent novels, his arch-enemy Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ended by crowing at the fact that Langsame Heimkehr bad failed to make it onto the best-seller list. ‘Let no one say there’s no such thing as progress,’ he concluded ...”

“... heavy in portents, swirling curtains, flickering candles, bumps in the dark, and the ghost of Peter Quint in particular looks as if he has come from a bad night at a rock concert. Still, Psycho was only a year old, and it must have been reasonable to think the audiences even for a classy film needed plenty of signals (shrieking music, for example) to show ...”

“... a painter’ – could apply equally well to the later work at the other end of the book. I began reading Berger’s reviews in New Zealand thirty years ago. They were a revelation. It did not really matter that you could not see the exhibitions he was writing about (airmail copies of the New Statesman arrived months before anything with illustrations): the ...”

“... events which precipitated the final schism between Constantinople and Rome), he summarised his reading: 280 books, serious, even devout, for the most part, but including three novels. In Achilles Tatius (whose work survives intact) he commended the style and regretted the immorality. Of lamblichos and Antonius Diogenes he recorded a detailed scenario which ...”

“... demonstrations of his ability to repeat lists of ideograms backwards or to recite texts after reading them only once. ‘By impressing the Chinese with his memory skills Ricci hoped to interest them in his culture; through interesting them in his culture he hoped to draw them to an interest in his God.’ Ricci had been trained by the Jesuits at Rome in ...”

“... designed to exert checks and balances, the same aim has been pursued by different methods. Peter Catterall offers a nicely-judged account of the influence of religion, suggesting that the breakdown in the Conservatives’ traditionally cosy relationship with the Church of England has been exaggerated. Indeed, in his revisionist conclusion, he ...”

“... Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year will bring on ...”

“... exact art is that it matters whether the book ends, as it did then, with the exchange, ‘Hallo Peter.’ ‘Hallo Dad.’ or as it does now: ‘Hallo Peter.’ ‘Hallo dad.’ For the distinction wouldn’t footle. You would have to interpret ‘Hallo dad’ as a tellingly unique and utterly final act of tacit ...”

“... words, words as patterns, have a long history. Inscriptions give dignity to words by slowing reading to a dead-march beat. The narcotic interlacings of an initial in the Lindisfarne Gospels delay the eye’s progress until the letter, like a word repeated over and over, loses its significance and drops out of the alphabet altogether. Carried to its ...”

“... understanding of Coetzee by tracing a line through Derrida, Barthes and the later Blanchot to a reading of the upheavals in French literary culture precipitated by the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and by the events of May 1968. As Barthes declared in 1977, these upheavals marked the final demise of the sacrosanct nationalist ‘myth’ of the Great ...”

“... less, are as remote as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to ...”

“... Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin’s book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact one of its great virtues is that it doesn’t try to minimise how difficult The Cantos is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those inseparable from the nature of the enterprise (i ...”

“... closer to those of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s functionaries. Laud (the son of a Reading cloth merchant and, like the king, a short man) looks at the painter with raised eyebrows – maybe he will be glad when the session is over. In a double portrait, Wentworth appears determined; his secretary, pen in hand, looks at him wide-eyed, as though ...”

“... at an auction without consulting a catalogue, one would have thought harder about a work before reading the evidence for and against. But it isn’t a game. In the visual arts anxiety about authenticity is endemic for good reasons. There is embarrassment when an attribution won’t stick if money was spent – public money in the case of the National ...”