“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... casebooks and crime reports and became a genre of their own. Few of the early works are read these days; fewer still are in print, overtaken by their more successful descendants in the two great schools of British detective writing. The late Victorian analytical style of Conan Doyle established the single-problem format: the case is ...”

“... At the end he soars and contemplates all of metaphysics and epistemology. The book will mostly be read as Putnam’s denunciation of his former philosophical psychology, to which he gave the name ‘functionalism’. I’ll try to explain that, but first a glance at what Putnam calls, when he soars, his ‘approach/avoidance’ relation to a family of large ...”

“... under Mr Major’s name in various newspapers during the campaign – which may be why they read better than some examples of the genre. Nevertheless, these sorts of book are in perpetual danger of sliding from hard-nosed reportage into a glutinous ‘lives of the saints’ approach to their subjects and their immediate associates. Alas, Mr Anderson’s ...”

“... disregarded rhythmic and textual wit better than anybody else has ever done, and truly makes us read the poems more intelligently, with greater appreciation of their almost invariable verbal felicity. To his poetic coevals Jarrell was the voice of sanity, somebody able to bring their fancies down to earth because his own were so firmly placed on the ...”

“... in the baby’s mouth. It kept the buggers quiet till the real thing came along: No, I don’t read books, the paper’s all I can do with ... But you should have met my missus before we got married – read – why, she was always at it, morning, noon and night. She was crazy on desert stuff and sheiks and all that. The ...”

“... 264.]’ Rushing aghast to letter 264 (addressed to Grainger’s Danish mistress Karen Holten), we read not only ureure but also: ‘Whipping is still lovely on all places, but, for me, most ravishing on the breasts ... Perhaps the effects are more painful when someone else strikes.’ The passage is well printed alongside a carefully placed facsimile of a bad ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reasonable price’); enthusiastic (‘No one who is interested in anything at all should fail to read this book’ – of Liddell Hart’s T.E. Lawrence); and nicely cheeky (of Churchill, ‘The old humbug can write’; Baden Powell, ‘nice old gentleman as he must be, is a ... Happiness-addict’). Within a short time he’d mastered all the tricks of the ...”

“... or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he ...”

“... though he was good at his art, apart from depicting tavern keepers, and gamblers, or gypsies who read palms, or beggar barons and porters, and the unfortunates who sleep in the squares at night, and he was the happiest man in the world when he painted a hostel with people eating and drinking in it. This mirrored the way he dressed, which was just like his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at last, Kierkegaard’s own greatest dream were to be realised: to ‘write’, or at least to be read, in a world language. Kierkegaard has always been loved and appreciated by the Americans. It is largely thanks to his early disciples there that he got a preliminary hearing, piecemeal and sometimes not very accurate, just before and during the last ...”