“... advocate of this view; and ‘countless paintings, particularly genre scenes, had to be “read” in a manner comparable to studying riddles and rebuses.’ The untutored eye might see only a group of men and women eating, drinking and music-making; but the educated viewer would recognise in a Merry Company an allegory of the five senses and ...”

“... accept if we had any evidence that the poem had any readers. Even Mortlock would seem not to have read it, for it is hard to believe that he would knowingly have run the risk of losing Stillingfleet’s business. Supposing that the decision to publish Order and Disorder was Lucy Hutchinson’s, we have then to ask what it was that she meant to publish. Order ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... is worked out at length in Eyeless in Gaza. It was a difficult novel to write (difficult, too, to read) and was preceded by a long period of nervous breakdown and excitement. The main strand of the narrative follows the short life of Brian Foxe, manifestly drawn from Trev, even down to the stammer. His mother, Mrs Foxe, is just as clearly drawn from Mrs ...”

“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... I never was a comic book reader,’ he later said. ‘I only wrote ’em, but I didn’t like to read ’em, particularly.’ Of his high-school contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow ...”

“... a family paper and listening in when London’s radical intelligentsia (the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, the Fabian Annie Besant, and a host of suffragists and socialists) talked politics at their house on Russell Square. Emmeline started a business selling Arts and Crafts soft furnishings and decorations, but it ...”

“... 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a borrowed paperback of the eleventh book in the series and initiated a full-dress relaunch of the series in America. Two years later O’Brian was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and by the time he turned eighty his sales were ticking up ...”

“... it is not a be-all or end-all statement like the autobiography of, say, Simone de Beauvoir. If you read it expecting anything very frank or deep or sustained, you will find it, as I did to begin with, disappointing. But unlike John Henry Newman, Muriel Spark is not a priest but an artist, and so does not need to apologise to anybody for her life. And ...”

“... of chance can be rigged – but this is not what we are conscious of in reading about Ursula. We read that she intended, in Hamlet’s words, to ‘leave betimes’, and that she did what she intended. That there was a pattern for her in Lermontov’s novel is conceivable: but it can’t be claimed that it fits her with exactitude, or that it provides an ...”

“... heroes. Many parents will be angry with what I have just said. ‘It is not like that at all. Peter is the most lovable little boy. We understand his need to have everything just so and we know he has trouble playing with other children. It’s a shame we cannot take him out much, because he gets disturbed and people don’t understand. But his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”