“... that Gus and Call might reflect conflicting – yet complementary – sides of their author makes reading this quartet of novels more fun, especially when considered alongside Daugherty’s biography. In these new reprints, the novels comprise about 2500 pages. Lined up beside one another they are about as wide as they are tall. Picador seems to want you to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what it was like to travel around Italy and the Mediterranean in the first century BC, study and reading, the frequent resort to Greek. In among this trove is priceless evidence for the ancient history of emotions: Cicero’s unyielding grief over the death of his beloved daughter Tullia has corrected many easy assumptions about the nature of family ties in ...”

“... picking up an extra charge and weight from the circumstances in which they are read. I was reading Chez Krull not many months after the Brexit vote and what appeared to be its immediate social repercussions: the wall-daubings, the increase in racial abuse, the throwing of shit at ‘foreign’ women, the arson of a halal butcher, the licensed aggro of ...”

“... The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of poetic force which is an almost inevitable feature of the literal Loeb ...”

“... and forfeiture. But Maus does not succumb to the temptation of eliding text with context and reading literature as law. She is refreshingly aware that the plays attracted audiences by staging exceptional situations. ‘Actual princesses,’ as she puts it, ‘do not flee to the greenwood in male disguise, there to court and marry indigent younger ...”