“... 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 ...”

“... entrance’ (‘zitternde Eintreten’) into his sisters’ room the next morning to read it to them. Literature’s double edge keeps it in a tremble, forever awaiting confirmation (however fast the author might have sat down at his desk the evening before). At this point, Kafka evidently hoped that his new commitment to Felice would strengthen ...”

“... the most frequent question writers get asked? ‘Do you use a pen or do you type?’ Readers read; writers write, right? Well no. For those who think academically about that sort of thing, like the contributors to this book of essays, authors create, and typists write. Some authors apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I ...”

“... from the upstairs window of a house overlooking the site, issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest and read the Riot Act, though it is unlikely that anyone heard them. Shortly after the meeting started at one o’clock, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry (consisting of volunteers recruited from local publicans and shopkeepers) charged into the ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... and of Deeside in particular. They knew she had written novels, but my mother certainly hadn’t read them, nor had most of the other students. The novels weren’t the point. The point of Nan Shepherd was herself. My mother described what a thrill it was to be carried along by her flow, to circle in the eddies of her experience and her asides. She liked to ...”

“... of ‘the political history of forgetting’. Perhaps, after all, Nietzsche’s sallies should be read with a little more detachment than the scholars who have contributed to this volume could muster – with the sort of irony that speaks from Jacob Burckhardt’s letter of February 1874: ‘In thanking you very warmly, and having merely rushed through this ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are packed with young people saying the rosary. It is true that a good many literary theorists read as though their work was composed by a computer as well as on one. Just as some doctors are always sick, so some critics can’t write. But it is too rarely pointed out that some of the most distinguished names in the field ...”

“... with a civil defence warden cadging a light from a cab driver, followed by a shot of the statue of Richard I flourishing his sword outside the Houses of Parliament. It was a huge success, both in the States, where it was seen by Roosevelt at a private screening, and when later released in Britain. Heart of Britain followed, a montage which features the ...”

“... Thing & although Education was a Word then unknown, as applied to females; They had taught me to read, & speak, & think, & translate from the French, till I was half a Prodigy.’ She learned French, Spanish and Italian (translating Racine freely in her critique of Pope’s Essay on Man, and Spectator articles into Italian), and at 17 met her tutor and ...”

“... men’) – was short, widely available and accessible to any European man or woman who could read Latin. As Alexander Bevilacqua shows in his erudite and eloquent book The Republic of Arabic Letters, Reiske was just one of a number of European scholars in the hundred years or so after 1650 who devoted a good deal of their time to learning Arabic and ...”