“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to work in a lawyer’s office but dreamed of literary glory. In 1823 he moved to Paris, where he read insatiably, and wrote unperformable plays, overheated poems and a collection of stories which, when it was published in 1826 at his own expense, sold four copies. His father’s old colleagues, not wishing to resurrect their Napoleonic youth, were reluctant ...”

“... by adverse comment as by adulation. Now the two occurred together. Aiken said it was impossible to read Eliot without respect, but it was also ‘becoming increasingly impossible’ to read him ‘without misgivings’; at the end of his Dial review of For Lancelot Andrewes he goes so far as to say that some of the book ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books. Gardening as an activity, however, is rather more complex than the gardens in which it results. It offers at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in ...”

“... at home, unoccupied for thirty years or so, awaiting his return. Many even doubt whether she could read or write, while few have given much thought to how she might have been employed. Greer can’t prove it, but she argues convincingly that Ann, who came from a strongly Protestant family, would almost certainly have been taught to ...”

“... by the art of the engineer.’ While there is art in Maillart’s bridges, they can also be read as solutions to engineering problems involving dimensions, money, time, materials, strength and stability. When architects become enamoured of the visual elegance of solutions over and above the beauty of the statics and economics, when they imitate bone ...”