“... 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 ...”

“... ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified the Borgo, the area around Saint Peter’s Basilica, and rebuilt the Trevi fountain, part of an ancient system that still brought water into the city (one of the tasks, and one of the marks, of authority in Rome). Julius planned to drive a long, straight road, the Via Giulia, through the heart ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was corrected for the rest of the day’s run. While he was inside, I bought the paper and read his article in the pub over the way. I could not see the error that so agitated him. It seemed a brilliant sketch, containing one phrase I particularly admired, envied even. When Ken returned, he stabbed his finger at the page. ‘That’s it! What I wrote ...”

“... offices in cities such as Brussels, Vienna and Paris in which letters were secretly opened and read. The wax seal, which should have guaranteed that a letter remained unopened, could be moulded using mercury, melted with steam and then remade after the letter had been read. Some letter-writers fought back: the technique ...”

“... and so he trusted her judgment; he deferred to her wishes even when he disagreed. He would later read her novel and poems and conclude that – while gracefully written and betraying a wide range of classical German influences – her work was not really ‘first class’. Perhaps not, but she was only in her mid-thirties when she died, and her son was ...”

“... Weimar in 1861, Muthesius was the son of a builder. A gifted child whose gifts were encouraged, he read widely, with a special fondness for Goethe. In his youth he learned bricklaying as well as music and was good at both, never losing interest in the practical and technical realities that must underlie any cultural achievement – the last illustration in the ...”