“... parallel story, the city’s burly Gatekeeper tells the newcomer that his allotted task is to ‘read’ dreams: to trace with his fingertips the delicate seams of light that issue from the many unicorn skulls stored in the town library. The Dreamreader, when not so occupied, notices that something is very wrong: despite the contentment of the ...”

“... whereas the $3000 million human genome project could one day allow the history of evolution to be read like a book. On the scale of moral worth, the $8000 million superconducting supercollider lies nearer to the human genome project, but that may not save it. The atom-smasher is designed to create energy conditions not seen in the universe since a trillionth ...”

“... to the whole Italian peninsula and the whole of the 18th century, Brinsley Ford then began to read and make transcriptions from hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscript letters and diaries in British libraries, the Public Record Office and private archives. His generosity in sharing the results of his research with other students and scholars became all ...”

“... said, we have lived/In important places’ (‘The Ministry of Fear’). It is a sobering thing to read O’Driscoll’s ten-page chronology of Heaney’s life (up to 2008): the meetings with famous men, the travel, the lectures and prizes and distinctions, things that are off the map, or off the charts. (Friendship with the empress of Japan? To Delphi to ...”

“... of the Church of England: fundamental principles that Benn imbibed from the Bible stories read to him by his Congregationalist mother. Old Labour was rooted in the sort of ‘gas and water socialism’ pioneered at the municipal level by the London County Council (of which Benn’s grandfather, John, was a member). In the 1931 crisis, old Labour ...”

“... is common with cult journals, Die Fackel’s subscribers were as illustrious as its contributors: Peter Altenberg, Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Trakl and Wedekind (whose play Spring Awakening Franzen translated in 1986 and published in 2007). Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Benjamin, who regarded Die Fackel as the literary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political views for granted, however. He could be equally difficult with Stalinists. And when Peter Hain’s group, Stop the Seventy Tour, led local anti-apartheid activists to dig up the cricket pitch in the Oxford Parks so as to sabotage the university match against the Springboks, Hodgkin was asked over and over again to sign a petition to get the ...”

“... illustrating just how politically and aesthetically diverse its contributors often were. Herbert Read, its most frequent book reviewer, was a Surrealist and anarcho-syndicalist educated in a Halifax orphanage, whereas the debonair dilettante Bonamy Dobrée, an odd compound of Strachey and Kipling, bellettrist frivolity and public school backbone, was ...”

“... Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that a suffocating blanket of prudery had for nearly a century characterised ‘Victorian’ England – France, too, for that matter. Mason agrees that, as ...”

“... well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf States came to the UK to enjoy the casinos, buy property, educate their children, shop and race their horses, and they banked ...”

“... with the support and editorial expertise of her friend Emily Coleman, who made sure T.S. Eliot read the manuscript. Though Eliot admired and published Nightwood, he wasn’t such a fan of Barnes’s poetry. A couple of years after Nightwood was published, Barnes showed him some poems she had written. He threatened to give her a black eye if she wrote any ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... academic research to assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions ...”

“... own account, Irina was born a nonconformist – even sympathising with the Russian equivalent of Peter Rabbit. As soon as she was old enough to count the change, she went out with the other children to stand in the bread queues. At school they had sums to work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a ...”