“... wasn’t much interest at first. I tried to get some volunteers by talking about the project at a reading in honour of the trilingual Galloway poet Willie Neill. There was a polite but frosty atmosphere, and afterwards a woman took me aside and said I might get a better response if my approach were less ‘bouncy’.I had more success the next day, after I ...”

“... or the lives of others.’ Wilde’s hyperbole here is a form of self-aggrandisement which, in Reading Gaol, can be forgiven. But I do not think it can be forgiven in a biographer. The truth of the matter may lie closer to hand. Although we no longer think of inversion as a ‘curse’, it is really the only one the Queensberries can accurately lay claim ...”

“... novels would doubtless wince at being called ‘new adults’, yet two of the books bear a seal reading ‘a book for new adults’ and all of them carry, for better and for worse, didactic overtones. Death, sex, disease, unhappy families and divorce are no longer forbidden territory in writing for children: the admirable intention is that the world of ...”

“... similar in subject-matter, and not very different in appearance and technique. But the modern reading of White’s album drawings – they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... I think it likely – or slightly more than likely – that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks ...”

“... Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association – you can’t, as a warmly sympathetic biographer of Freud, do-better than that. The sheer amount of biographical, historical and psychoanalytical detail that has gone into the making of this Life is, as far as I can see, unparalleled in the literature of its subject; and so are the care and informed intelligence with which this stupendous mass of facts, conjectures and speculations has been sifted, as well as the attractive, good-humoured and unstrenuous way most of it has been presented ...”

“... house-like Barcelona Pavilion (computer graphics are supplied, so that even those who don’t like reading plans can have a go). The single family house is not a simple apprentice task for an architect: home life demands at least as much ingenuity in planning as office life. Imagining what it would be like to live in a house is more intriguing than imagining ...”

“... Freud, as did so many others in Freud’s circle, through a book. But it was not love at first reading: a physician specialising in psychiatry, Ferenczi found The Interpretation of Dreams lacking in scientific rigour. But once he learned of the severely empirical manner in which, in their rigorous word-association experiments, Jung and his colleagues in ...”

“... her hip, are put into poses which suggest informality, amiability and mutual comfort. Mr and Mrs Peter Perez Burdett are altogether stranger; the portrait Wright painted as a gift hadn’t, until now, been outside Prague since the subjects’ daughter took it there on her marriage. The husband – young, lively, in casual bright clothes – contrasts with ...”

“... than what a lot of people who thought they were overtaking them in the years between have managed. Reading the funny letters Minton wrote, and applying their tone of voice to the things people who knew him remember, makes it clear why he had many friends, and why his downward spiral into alcoholism, and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love ...”

“... be a very difficult subject) and the redundant descriptions should not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but ...”

“... Recently, on the radio, Leslie Dick remarked that Kathy Acker’s writing was an extension of her reading, that her plagiarism was a way of reading, or rereading, appropriating and customising what she read, writing herself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text. Acker used to read her own texts too, each one ...”