“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... I was depressed, so I knew it made a kind of sense. Twenty-four hours later, I found I couldn’t read; print blurred before my eyes. In the university library I tried to study the side effects of the drug.I went to see my tutor in Equity, and said: look, Mr Loath (it wasn’t his name, I didn’t say it, it was just what the frightened spotty boys called ...”

“... in formation and resistant to external view. As an episodic (non-dues-paying) member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison ...”

“... Stanley Duke, is threatened by a half-circle of four towering women. The blurb beckons to women to read, in order to be outraged: ‘it is not a book that is likely to win many prizes for fairness or fashionable social attitudes.’ It is certainly not a book that is likely to win many prizes for accurate representation of itself. After the coat-trailing comes ...”

“... into each other occasionally after the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and we once read to an audience of nine in Burnley (I doubt if even one of the nine was there to hear me). Otherwise my memories are from the period before she was ‘Jeanette Winterson’, the outsider who gatecrashed the canon, or alternatively the self-sabotaging golden ...”

“... trope seeming to be to create a sense of the story as an improvisation, as coming into being as we read. The numbering of the paragraphs contributes to this feeling. Already by paragraph nine the writer has handed over proceedings to ‘the elegant woman’, only occasionally thereafter tapping us on the shoulder as if to remind us that he is still there.The ...”

“... axis of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward distancings, is apparent in the ...”

“... The high point of the trip, she told Warner, was a visit to Kensington Gardens to pay homage to Peter Pan. ‘Since I am very indulgent to my childhood romances, and keep holiday with them almost religiously,’ she wrote, ‘I just bowed the knee and worshipped like the Oriental or the Romanist at the sound of prayer bells.’ It was another role she’d ...”

“... disciples (despite its title, the Acts of the Apostles has little to say about any of them except Peter; its main protagonist is Paul, an early apostle but not one of the ‘twelve’). The earliest written source on the subject is to be found in the Apocrypha. This is a class of writings which may not seem the best source for documentary data, though to call ...”

“... were being discussed in web-postings, the true measure of jihadi fame. Since then, he has been read at West Point, profiled by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, heralded by Newsweek as the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaida’ and by CNN as ‘the most dangerous terrorist you’ve never heard of’. The ‘architect of global jihad’ seems to have been ...”

“... He learned through experience to moderate his alcohol intake and learned, too, that he could now read Nietzsche without risking his own sanity. His father died during the first year, leaving Jung the man of the house, but he returned regularly in Jung’s dreams, leaving Jung too embarrassed to tell him he was dead. Thereafter, Jung seriously wondered about ...”

“... profession in general. It cannot have been an easy book to write, and it is not an easy book to read. Hugo Ott is a social historian of 19th-century Germany; born in 1931, he teaches at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger’s own university. A conservative German professor of considerable standing, he has spent some twenty years collecting material and ...”

“... 1848 never tired of pointing out, but what was the point of a newspaper if you were too hungry to read it? The problem was captured by German radicals in the playful juxtaposition of the ‘freedom to read’ (Pressefreiheit) with the ‘freedom to feed’ (Fressefreiheit).The spectre of pauperisation had loomed over the ...”

“... a poem might indeed be an expression of neurological problems; or it could be a symptom of having read Coleridge, or maybe De Quincey, or the Brontës. But to me it looks like something else entirely. The uncanniness we feel here is not a matter of mere mystery: not, that is, a reminder that we are missing information that, if it could only be ...”

“... dozen programmes are alone worth the licence fee.27 July. A flying visit to Norfolk, where I am to read at the Holt Festival. Rather than hang about all morning R. sensibly gets us off to look at two churches at Warham, both medieval but with one done up in the 18th century. As we look round the first church (which has three fonts) there is some sort of ...”