“... in the great texts themselves. ‘We often complain,’ says Culler, ‘that students have not read enough when they come to college, but the problem is not a quantitative one that would be solved by more assigned readings. The problem is structural, involving the marginal situation of literature within the students’ cultures.’ (And not just ...”

“... to the compilers of travel guides and their more literal-minded users, yet most people prefer to read about murder, volcanic eruptions, set-piece battles and major epidemics than do or be done to at first hand. Some people would rather read about cooking and eating than spend their lives in the kitchen. The flaw, a man ...”

“... areas has become more widespread in Nabokov studies recently, thanks in large part I suspect to Richard Rorty’s work on the writer in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, and in his excellent introduction to the Everyman edition of Pale Fire. (In the case of the Everyman Lolita, incidentally, somebody seems to have had a rush of blood to the ...”

“... sounded less tweedy, more challenging, more convinced. He gave one a new idea of what it meant to read, and seemed more intimately, more agonistically engaged with poetry than anybody else except possibly the youthful William Empson, whom at this time he greatly admired. And the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality. That gnarled ...”

“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian things, obscure histories and occult treatises. Like some other poets, including Shakespeare, he gives one the impression that what he ...”

“... they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international wars, which may be one of the reasons ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... be writing the history of art? Three recent books bear on these issues. The Seicento specialists Richard Spear and Philip Sohm have put together Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of 17th-Century Italian Painters, which explores what new co-ordinates one current academic strategy has to deliver; while two treatments of Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon ...”

“... Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, Shakespeare was better read in Latin writers than the vast majority of undergraduates today, and although his knowledge of Greek literature seems to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... bummer to say so, perhaps, but Schenkar offers some of the most searing and honest writing I’ve read about everything that can go wrong, psychologically speaking, in lesbian relationships, especially between two fiercely independent creative women. (Put The Talented Miss Highsmith on a short list with Marina Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend Poems and Violette ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... would take six months, after which I would write an amusing little essay about how we should all read more Zola.* This is not what happened. It took me two years. In that time, I had two books published, wrote another two books, moved from Iowa City to New York, taught myself film photography, became a professor of creative writing and an acquiring editor ...”

“... perhaps we are made in equal measure of what could have been and what is. Anyone who has read Marías will immediately recognise this highly rhetorical style, at once well-rehearsed and slightly distraught, from his novels, which also abound with catalogues of synonyms.* ‘What Does and Doesn’t Happen’ must be one of the great contemporary ...”