“... 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 ...”

“... me, even if a player like Carlsen finds the accumulation of small advantages more satisfying. As I read this book, I started to realise what a hopeless task Butler had been assigned. Carlsen refused to spend any time with Butler, so he has to rely heavily on existing journalism. He sets out to illuminate Carlsen’s genius, but the paucity of new material ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), which devoted a chapter to his formative adventures in the Caribbean and Central America together with his wife ...”

“... employs a refined poetic diction. He is also, as some of this may imply, less pleasurable to read. Sun Poem is nothing if not structured. It has 12 sections, suggestive of an annual cycle, or of the hours between sunrise and dark; seven of these sections correspond to the colours of the rainbow, though in puns that have further dimensions ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... name for curiosity? What if there are theoretical questions to be asked about models? What if you read the Frankfurt School and also crank through microfilm? This in fact is what both Bordwell and Perez do. What’s mildly worrying is not their practice but their rhetoric of disavowal, their willingness to sound like the intellectual philistines they are ...”

“... towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library ...”

“... mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market ...”

“... work carried out in other countries’. He had studied in Germany before the First World War, and read and spoke German; he had also visited England and met English economic historians; and he was the author of a major, synoptic analysis of Feudal Society, first published in 1939 and finally translated into English in 1961, as well as a study of the ‘royal ...”

“... Germany’s foremost living poet. Enzensberger is the most important postwar writer you have never read. He was born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren. His father was a post office bureaucrat with expertise in radio and telecommunications, aspects of a burgeoning modernity that would engage the interest of his eldest son. Expelled from the Hitler ...”