“... loved and protected. This is the privilege of my body which I must renounce. It’s impossible to read the story without speculating about the dizzying extremity of unselfishness that would dissolve all but an unseen core of personality. And that extremity is given visible form in the image of the fat, ugly women, agonised by vain love, vain sexual desire, as ...”

“... as the emergence of a dynamic reformist leadership in 1985 did. Though perhaps not if they read The Gorbachev Phenomenon – the most illuminating study of the origins and nature of perestroika to have appeared. As the subtitle indicates, the book’s perspective is historical; it is, moreover, confined neither to the last decade or two, nor to the ...”

“... in history to abide by his own teachings. Some 2500 years later, in 1975, the philosopher Peter Unger published a book called Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, in which, at the stupendous length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the ...”

“... gaunt, hairy-bodied and bony-headed, middle-aged man narcissising in the nude is creepy. One can read Stipe-the-starveling in different ways. He likes enigma. Is he bisexual? interviewers ask. No, he replies, he is ‘sexual’. A gifted mimic, physically and vocally, he can change himself with chameleon facility – ‘I can be whatever you want,’ he has ...”

“... It can mean a memorial or a panegyric, it can mean a hatchet job, it can simply mean a good read (Wyndham Lewis once said that good biographies are like novels); or it can mean something scholarly, academic, definitive: a dull attempt to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – as far as that is possible. I have no wish to say that ...”

“... published in Le Soir, a newspaper of pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as endorsing what amounts to a collaborationist line. There is talk of the need to preserve national cultures against harmful ‘cosmopolitan’ influences; of the Jewish element in modern thought as a threat to this healthy condition; and of German ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin​ was on his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago. It was the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short journey back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the day with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on Stalin’s orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers ...”

“... Coronation (1902) ‘was distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military ...”

“... fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that ...”

“... him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are ...”

“... later Yorkshire Tragedy a husband runs amok, killing two of his children and wounding his wife.I read these Elizabethan murder plays with the same guilty pleasure that I watch their modern counterparts, but their fondness for the ‘wicked wife’ stereotype is hard to enjoy. It runs counter to the actuality of domestic violence in this period. The records ...”

“... South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she says. But what she does know brings us almost into the room with him:Brother Robert kept his hair neat, using Dixie Peach pomade. He greased Vaseline ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... and Benny Green identify her as a Gaiety Girl drowned the previous year at Goring: ‘Jerome read a report of the tragedy in the Berkshire Chronicle and decided to incorporate it into his story’). Jerome’s most successful serious play, though few would now grant it the second adjective, was The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in which a Christ-like ...”