“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the different translations I will describe in a moment:There is a large element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”

“... So he argues that St Bernard of Clairvaux represented the new scholastic learning of Peter Abelard as pedantry, which encouraged ‘curiosity, novelty and a dangerous reliance on human reason’, while ‘the figure of the humanist pedant developed into a negative stereotype that highlights the antisocial characteristics of these learned ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... more polite and discussable aspects of Eliot as a person who had, for example, thought a bit and read a bit. Some writers tried, as Eliot himself never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could ...”

“... the constraints placed on Andrew, though not apparently on his opinions, we’re almost bound to read it more critically – even the non-conspiracy theorists among us – than we do most history books. One problem is that we can’t check anything, since most of the primary sources are listed simply as ‘security service archives’, with no further ...”

“... must not be called in half-way through’), and a passion for English literature. The books she read with the inner group allowed for a certain release of emotion – in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his desk; Nietzsche called him ‘the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn’. What most novelists would pay for blurbs ...”

“... things the Saviour said or should have said – dense admonishments in nail polish too small to be read. No surface, she observes, ever seems equal to the psychic needs of those who create such crude and disquieting things: Their purpose wraps around the back of things and under arms; they gouge and hatch and glue on charms till likeable materials – apple ...”

“... bright child if I could have had her just average.’ According to Buck’s definitive biographer, Peter Conn, on the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony she told her sister that she would ‘much rather be having a baby than going to Sweden’: ‘Nothing means overwhelmingly much to me, since the fundamental inevitable for me must remain inevitable.’ And ...”

“... events. Enwezor’s Biennale is more interesting for what you learn than what you see; as Peter Campbell wrote of Sarah Sze, another artist of arrangement (and also at the Biennale), you don’t so much look at what’s in front of you as read it. There are attempts to question underlying attitudes. The artists of ...”

“... of the kind of ‘artificial reason’ fostered among common lawyers. According to Bourke, Burke read the French Revolution as an outgrowth not of genuine Enlightenment, but of a ‘spurious’ pseudo-Enlightenment founded on the dogmatic claims of deism. In this way Bourke daringly reappropriates Burke’s conservative counter-Enlightenment classic ...”