“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... which ended with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perestroika story, as we read it in the West, was about an enlightened Soviet leader’s effort to democratise internally, while at the same time ending the Cold War. The first part failed; the second succeeded, but ended up looking like a victory for the other side. After the Soviet ...”

“... a group of locals, musical and devout. The next, song sheets were handed out, with music few could read, and we were expected to sing along. The New People’s Mass has ever since been rather a grim affair – a dreadful noise in the pits while the faithful work out where quavers go and what crotchets sound like. The change had been made in the name of the ...”

“... the supernatural. From this extraordinary correspondence, which will radically change the way we read psychoanalysis, it is clear that ‘sexuality’ and the ‘unconscious’ were the new, the scientifically prestigious words for the occult: for that which is beyond our capacity for knowledge, for the weird, unaccountable effects people have on each ...”

“... to the final scene and hands it over to me saying, ‘This might interest you.’ While I read, he turns to the Times obits, at which he registers disappointment, then to the book page, which provokes a groan ... When I say that I think the Bedlam scene contains some of the most beautiful lines ever intended for an opera, he grants me ten additional ...”

“... a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as Austria, either.’ I thought of Musil when I read a passage from Keith Ajegbo’s recent Diversity and Citizenship report. The investigator was talking to a little seven-year-old, who was the only English child in her class. After all the others had talked about their origins, she said sadly: ‘I come from ...”

“... to abuse their position of spiritual authority by getting hold of grimoires (which they could now read) and charging parishioners for extra services involving the conjuration of spirits.Rates of education among the rest of society improved during the same period, in tandem with the rise of print. Many of the ‘cunning folk’, rural practitioners of ...”

“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... frightening pallor and unfathomable occupation, to be exactly real. He was Mr McGregor from the Peter Rabbit tales, or one of those old men in Edward Ardizzone books who shake their skinny fists at naughty children and weakly yell ‘Confound you!’ A world in which adults didn’t much credit the reality of children could work the other way round, too.At ...”

“... scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this would have to be discounted when assessing their ability. Nowadays because competition is so fierce actors come knowing the audition scene by heart and so it’s much easier to gauge what they ...”

“... Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life ...”

“... You must leave life for that. No But always to preserve the adventive Minute … I’m tempted to read ‘you must leave life for that’ as meaning we must leave such things to life itself; but that is not what the phrase says. Durrell’s Quartet is an attempt at a masterpiece of size (and shape and time), but he didn’t leave life for it. He stayed with ...”

“... in the spectacular understatement of the secret government report on nuclear war of 1955 quoted by Peter Hennessy (‘whether this country could withstand an all-out attack and still be in a state to carry on hostilities must be very doubtful’). To expect to die in the next war, as my contemporaries not unreasonably did in 1939 – Overy quotes my own ...”

“... by someone ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the tacit racism, banning the word ‘nigger’ and repressing direct mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the real world would draw out the story’s ...”