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“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... only recently available), should Worthen’s book strike one as an exhausting slog to read? Of course it is a long book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but ...”

“... and, to cap and threaten it all, the War. Some of these, it must be said, are more rewarding to read than others. The best letters, as a rule, are those in which the correspondents are at a distance and not planning to meet soon: then what is to be said can’t be postponed till a tête-à-tête. When James had read Mrs ...”

“... including the editors. Five years ago they edited another collection, since widely-read: The Thatcher Effect, published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life ...”

“... to play their parts properly. The essays which make up this short book are unpretentious, well-read and illuminating. One particularly attractive feature is the way Blakemore demonstrates the consistency between Burke’s political writings narrowly considered and the concerns of his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He ...”

“... had been one of the dreariest museums in London – a tourist guidebook at the time apparently read simply: ‘National Portrait Gallery. No lavatories’ – from a place where you would only be seen dead (literally: it was not until Strong’s directorship that the Gallery started to collect portraits of the living) into a fashionable place to see and be ...”

“... literary calling float through the novel like a set of spectral teases. It’s a bit like seeing Richard Burton use the technique he learnt for Henry V to play some Alistair Maclean paratrooper. Intermittently, the nonsense assumes a human shape and pressure, the dialogue, when it is not too blatantly James versus James, sounds like something a human being ...”

“... to the present). The term ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), coined in the 1840s by Richard Owen, is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn ...”

“... In a recent article in the Observer, he describes how, with 3188 pages of text set and proof-read, he began to feel sharp chest and stomach pains. ‘My wife was certain that I was spending too many hours crouched over my desk.’ A few weeks later, Davison had to have a sextuple heart by-pass, after which he felt that he was ‘living on borrowed ...”

“... without mercy to be punished to the example of all other. MacCulloch knows that this can be read as a ‘craven piece of toadying’, but he insists that it be read quite otherwise, as ‘a model of pastoral wisdom and courage’. Likewise with Cranmer’s letter on Cromwell’s fall. MacCulloch recognises how ...”

“... not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its effect on Coleridge. He atones for it ...”

“... a classical education’ created ‘from external schemas of how a people’s history ought to read’. It would be hard to imagine a more powerful demonstration of the way early medieval historical narratives worked on European imaginations. My only demur would be over the labelling of Bryant as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century ...”

“... culture of sameness.’ Yet unlike critics whose laments about McWorlds and the malling of America read as obituaries for urban culture, Bender finds counter-movements and new spaces emerging on the streets of New York and beyond. Contemporary critics and city planners misunderstand lived experience when they focus on dramatic urban centres and fail to see the ...”

“... than Kicks. ‘I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them.’ The spurs to fantasy in his case were failure and rejection, which he suffered on a grand scale – one of the reasons his biography makes such consoling reading for struggling writers. About twelve years ago ...”

“... paper and wire line guides to allow the blind to write so that the sighted could read it. His first European voyage was prescribed by his physician, who believed that the Mediterranean air would help his rheumatic pains. Instead of taking a sighted companion, he went alone across the Channel, tapping his solitary way south from ...”