“... the most frequent question writers get asked? ‘Do you use a pen or do you type?’ Readers read; writers write, right? Well no. For those who think academically about that sort of thing, like the contributors to this book of essays, authors create, and typists write. Some authors apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I ...”

“... More said he would rather see Utopia burnt than translated into the language ordinary people could read. This is surely a more important distinction than the narrow line which separates Winstanley or Harrington from the millenarians, Gott from advocates of a ‘perfect moral community’. Dr Davis does not even distinguish between utopias written ...”

“... and of Deeside in particular. They knew she had written novels, but my mother certainly hadn’t read them, nor had most of the other students. The novels weren’t the point. The point of Nan Shepherd was herself. My mother described what a thrill it was to be carried along by her flow, to circle in the eddies of her experience and her asides. She liked to ...”

“... no mathematics at all. What it does offer is a new world view. Although the book has been widely read and enjoyed, it has also aroused strong hostility. Much of this hostility arises, I believe, from misunderstanding, or rather, from several misunderstandings. Of these, the most fundamental is a failure to understand what the book is about. It is a book ...”

“... point, however; and any loss is more than made up for by Paul Hammond’s splendid notes, easy to read at the foot of the same page, and full of the most fascinating matter. Absalom and Achitophel is a storehouse of social and political history; and this text enables us to learn or to recall it without effort, to enjoy simultaneously the vigorous couplets of ...”

“... had Plato as their enemy. We are told that at the door of Plato’s Academy there was a sign that read ‘Let no one enter who knows no geometry,’ and the studies that went on inside it were very hard. Plato thought, with increasing sternness as he got older, that philosophy could not help anyone unless it was true to itself. Its truthfulness ...”

“... thorough. He has investigated the history of the kiln and the physics of each firing. He has read Jack Troy’s Wood-Fired Stoneware and Porcelain, Gaston Bachelard’s writings about fire and the work of the ceramics historian Daniel Rhodes. He has learnt that ‘most clays derive from the disintegration of granitic and feldspathic rock and consist of ...”

“... as a writer of young adult classics whose work has not transcended its era; Capote is little read except for his atypical In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century ...”

“... kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were “not brainy”.’ Stevenson reminds us that the magazine wasn’t always either safe or respectable: to disturb the peace was its founding brief. It was started in 1817 by William Blackwood, an ...”

“... entrance’ (‘zitternde Eintreten’) into his sisters’ room the next morning to read it to them. Literature’s double edge keeps it in a tremble, forever awaiting confirmation (however fast the author might have sat down at his desk the evening before). At this point, Kafka evidently hoped that his new commitment to Felice would strengthen ...”

“... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and ...”

“... is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political ...”

“... above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important ...”

“... precisely which feeling. Wendy Steiner, in The Scandal of Pleasure (1995), is another such critic; Richard Meyer, in Outlaw Representation (2002), is another. In fact, some critics back then, supportive of Mapplethorpe but unaware of what he’d said, found nothing at all pornographic – or so they have claimed publicly – about the work. Roland Barthes, for ...”

“... up like a great novel, before driving off a narrative cliff. Yet by the end I still felt I had read something significant. So what is Meredith up to when he isn’t telling a story?Let’s go back to the beginning. It is the middle of the night, and the inhabitants of Riversley Grange are woken by a banging on the door. On the step is a man barred from the ...”