“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in my commonplace book the following nine items from A Colder Eye. One: Dubliners do not read the Bible. Two: in Joyce’s day, most Dubliners were Catholic, but that designation ‘was apt to denote less a state of supernatural conviction than a web of secular allegiances’. Three: one of the differences between Ireland and England is that in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knife); and that they hurtle shutki (jokes) at him which detonate like Molotov cocktails. ‘I read on the Russian internet that you and your novels will soon be forgotten,’ Semyon says. ‘Yes,’ Nina dutifully adds. ‘I read that too.’ But the thing is they look like nice people. They’re attractive. They’re ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... Crossfire gave Ryan his first role as a psychopath, and he went out of his way to get it. He had read the novel The Brick Foxhole by his friend Richard Brooks, and his memories of Camp Pendleton, where he had served as a drill sergeant in 1944 and 1945, brought the character close to home. ‘I know that son of a ...”

“... 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 ...”