“... are secretly at one: if the illusions of suburban consciousness are to be shattered, and the reading subject put in touch with his or her permanent, imperishable selfhood, a good many guerrilla raids on ordinary language will prove necessary. But Modernism proves unable to stabilise the relation between the changeless and the contingent – a relation ...”

“... as a foolish parasite on Johnson’s greatness, a ‘tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’, as Peter Pindar had called him. Then, in 1925, the seesaw that had always been Boswell’s fate tilted once again. That year saw the beginning of one of three remarkable American initiatives, all linked in some way to Yale University, that would considerably enrich ...”

“... of the enemy, as she did in the Fortnightly; she was happier with the implacability of Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1940 Virginia Woolf was asked to supply ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ for an American symposium on current affairs concerning women. She had to fall back on rambling and padded reflections which she hoped might help in years to come the ...”

“... streak, of the absence of books in his rooms and his habitual preference for partying over reading, and of his dislike of serious intellectual discussions, during which he tended to slope off to the piano. His manuscripts were mis-spelt and badly punctuated. He never learned any language well enough to speak it, and it is not clear that his French was ...”

“... and from above, the yard is one of those places where the city’s built environment seems to peter out and go to seed; though crossed by fences and framed by the sides of buildings, it seems indifferent to any formal order. Fried speaks of a ‘sense of makeshiftness, of an entire environment having been put together, constructed, not in a spirit of ...”

“... in the dim light of dawn to visit one of the males in his own territory.’ Back in the 1960s, Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid, turned into Spiderman and acquired the ability to scuttle up the sides of tall buildings. Birkhead’s book could inspire a whole new breed of pornographic superheroes, replete with extraordinary powers and dark ...”

“... model for Bond. Ainsworth, the eldest son of a wealthy Manchester lawyer, had spent his childhood reading about highwaymen, but was no highwayman himself, though he had Turpin’s contempt for respectable society. ‘We have not had the pleasure of being acquainted with Mrs Ainsworth,’ a correspondent wrote in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘but we are sincerely ...”

“... her work by those ‘fed too long on the pieties of academia’, her novels have been required reading on a number of university courses in the United States and elsewhere for a while now: when I started the first term of my first year at a South African university in the 1980s, Martha Quest was right there at the top of the booklist, ahead of Dickens and ...”

“... strike on Nasser’s Egypt. And so on. Benn’s socialism has always been steeped in a certain reading of the English radical tradition – 1640, 1837, 1900 – but in his twilight years it is the spirit of 1945 that he invokes with most passion. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the cult of Tony Benn comes down to his dogged restatement of old ...”

“... remarks in his diaries, it seems Forster regretted his own lack of ‘the pictorial outlook’. Reading Hopkins’s poems in 1924, he sees himself by contrast as always ‘engaged in carnality, intellect, humour, kindness: never bothering to record the aesthetic’. In his seventies he was still taking up an old worry about his own powers of seeing. In a ...”

“... haltingly) a piece I’ve written about the libraries I’ve worked in, including the Round Reading Room at the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. The memoranda rolls on which I spent most of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment about five foot in length and written on both sides. To turn the page required the co-operation and ...”

“... in it (not even in his suicide); this person whose books I briefly thought I wouldn’t mind reading, before, while setting down the umpteenth of them amid groans (it was the novella Confusion), adding the stipulation to myself: yes, but only if they’d been written by someone else.Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing. He ...”

“... what he defined as a ‘moral’ authority. To attack them was to prefer a corrosive scepticism to reading rigorously. He pointed out that he could use the critics’ own methods to ‘attack and reject the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and the writings of all the ancients, indeed Holy Scripture itself, and the books of all good authors. This presumption and ...”

“... novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught by a chance reading of The Golden Ocean (1956), a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his way around the age of sail. He had inserted two fictional Irish heroes into George Anson’s voyage around the world in the 1740s, and could do 18th-century ...”

“... chemical nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s ...”