“... of spawn; some were mere skins, like discarded gloves. It was a grotesque sight. I’d never read Ring of Bright Water, just knew it was some sort of old-school nature writing about otters. There had been a film. I’d assumed the ‘ring of bright water’ was what you saw on the surface after an otter dived. That evening, I picked the book from the ...”

“... near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed ...”

“... and sinks into a mire of bloated, yearning commonplaces. Marc Shell, however, has been able to read the braille of another tale beneath the rhetorical surplus, and to discover there the brightness of an individual imagination communicating strongly within given restrictions. His guidance is indispensable. Even Lacan was alert to the female ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to judge from the texts which Steinberg quotes (and for that matter from the much more widely read Golden Legend, which he overlooks), lay in the fact that Christ shed his own blood. The blood was proof of the Incarnation, just as it was also a premonition of the Passion. What mattered, in fact, was not the penis but the wound. One might have expected ...”

“... should have been digested or they shouldn’t have been broached. The TLS furore or fury about Peter Reading’s poem ‘Cub’ – anti-semitic, or dramatising anti-semitism? – isn’t appropriately or commensurately to be engaged with in two pages of musings (under the aegis ‘Or Only Funny and Sad?’), ending with: ‘Tone is a fearfully difficult ...”

“... 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 ...”