“... if she didn’t seem to have been perfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha’s reply to a letter of condolence after Freud’s death that it was ‘a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possible to remove the ...”

“... a prism through which to look at the changes in Russian society is inspired. His book is not light reading: the story is complex and he has done a lot of research (if readers want to try something less demanding first, they can go to his article, ‘Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia’, in the Crowley and Reid collection).1 But it shows Lovell to be a ...”

“... Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong imperative to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality ...”

“... The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas ...”

“... politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the result of a lack of editorial focus. (There’s an unfortunate typo on ...”

“... his writing. Zuckerman first appeared in My Life as a Man, but as the creation of another writer, Peter Tarnopol, rather than Roth. This is really a new start for him. Zuckerman is at a crossroads, having written stories based on his New Jersey Jewish background that have caused offence within the family. (There are many points of correspondence between ...”

“... this was just mischief. For me it was mostly mischief, too, but given a high-minded gloss by my reading. These pranks were little blows against bourgeois living death. A similar mixture of ennui, restlessness and vindictive retaliation against stifling surroundings was probably what fuelled the King Mob operatives who daubed the long-lasting graffiti on a ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past … the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed ...”

“... the new reunited Bundesrepublik. This ‘second’ book makes dispiriting and increasingly painful reading. The summaries of late 20th-century German history are fine, although not particularly revealing. It is the memoir that is the problem, not because the life it recalls was a failure but – curiously – because it was an endless stream of successes that ...”

“... themselves doing exactly the same things they would be doing if the children weren’t there: reading papers, sending emails, talking on the phone. When the children are small the wives occupy themselves in the supervision of nannies and builders: once the children are in school full-time they go back to work; when the time for secondary education ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... is published in February 1995, to great and continuing admiration. The philosopher continues reading and writing when she can through treatments and setbacks. She dies at the end of the same year.There was​ no set reading list for Gillian Rose’s Kierkegaard lectures at the University of Sussex in 1986. But she ...”

“... Diana, and, grotesquely, produced more news as a result. But looking back now, the moment of reading that article was also my own first glimpse of the crash traditional newspapers were skidding into. There were two things that were encouraging for the papers about how the news happened to reach me as an individual that morning. The first was that a ...”

“... the translator credited. Only the acknowledgment that the book was originally published in 1961 by Peter Owen allowed me to discover that the translator was A.E. Murch. The material reinstated by Einaudi in 1990 is not included; Taylor seems unaware of this. The new edition has few notes, no chronology and no index. This, together with frequent and sometimes ...”