“... pretends to a mysterious ‘chain’ in Les Lettres Persanes, not immediately visible to the naked reading eye, they create their own continuity out of a tone, a set of shared assumptions, a manner of proceeding. For the Tatler’s sun, like that of Heraclitus, had to be relit each morning, or rather every other morning. We read on, sensing the passage of ...”

“... and asked that his prize possession, his furred robes, be placed at the altar of the Church of St Peter in Louvain. To posterity, the awesome contemporary reputation of Lipsius’s writing may seem curiously inflated. The admiration aroused by his textual work was often uncritical. His philosophical treatises strung together Classical texts much as Protestant ...”

“... that he was one of them. Yet, surely, he was from boyhood a wandering, adventurous, hard-reading intellectual, eager for fame and the company of the powerful, a roving reporter and a risk-loving political agitator. Rural Rides, his most popular book, has solidified his reputation as a rustic. But 60-year-old peasants don’t go rushing around the ...”

“... the deadening effect of Soviet-style historical materialism by a more imaginative and selective reading of the texts: this was the milieu in which Finley received his early training, when employed at Columbia from 1937 to 1939 by the Institut in exile. This eclecticism of his has since led him into fierce controversies with orthodox Marxists in Italy and ...”

“... of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike ...”

“... irrelevance) of constitutional reform as an issue during it. This part of the book is like reading a bunch of Sunday newspaper articles – which would not matter too much if there were some deeper structure, but there is little or nothing in an analytical vein. Barnett takes us back to the recent past, not to explain it but rather to relive and (he ...”

“... wry, informed and deliberately informal, could agree to collaborate on it, and make it worth reading. Together, the two Irish writers connect Heaney’s poems with the people, places, books and songs that he has known.Songs matter more than you might think; so do some places, especially California, and so, by the end, do the mixed blessings of fame. The ...”

“... his retirement without his having agreed to it – but Prisongate will make uncomfortable reading for ministers. It is a vivid and at times idiosyncratic account expressive in equal measure of personal frustration and moral outrage. Despite differences in tone and style, the book has striking parallels with Lewis’s. Both men were outsiders to the ...”

“... of early 1960s London. Maverick, ambitious and something of a fantasist, he was a co-owner with Peter Cook of Private Eye and the Establishment Club in Soho. He was also a habitué of John Aspinall’s gambling club, the Clermont, which became the fulcrum of Lucan’s life after he left the bank. When Lucan disappeared the ‘Clermont set’ loomed large in ...”

“... mental or physical exercise of almost any kind. Two inspirational teachers gave him a love of reading and, more excessively, of animal life. Philip Hobsbaum, who in his later academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs ...”

“... contact with another. He evolved from that sense of dislocation his theory of ‘contrapuntal’ reading, put forward in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an ...”

“... is erratically revived: ‘He went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn.’ Later in the same book, Frequent Hearses, Fen laments the arrival of the long vacation because there will be no demands on his time. The happily married detective is a dull ...”

“... the United States and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject. Yuri Slezkine dedicates the book to his grandmother: not the Russian noblewoman who, despite having ‘lost everything she owned in the Revolution’, ‘at the end of her life … was a loyal ...”

“... But then, noticing a fire fed by two peasant women, he approaches and tells them the story of St Peter, also seeking warmth on a bitter night; they break down and weep at Peter’s denial of Christ and Peter’s own tears at his betrayal. What had occurred in Palestine 19 centuries ...”

“... For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day ...”