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“... her daughter’s book but not by Jane Howard) Mead was bisexual. Her affair with her teacher Ruth Benedict lasted for many years, as did that with Geoffrey Gorer. Without these two ‘intense liaisons’ it is unlikely that the bizarre research project known as the Study of Culture at a Distance and its successors would ever have got off the ground. Howard ...”

“... These can be held to be descriptions of the necessary but not the sufficient conditions. To Benedict Anderson nationalism is the result of mass literacy and print. It is only, he argues, when people can imagine a nation that it can come into existence, and people will do this imagining only under the stimulus of common exposure to the same body of the ...”

“... to the whole Italian peninsula and the whole of the 18th century, Brinsley Ford then began to read and make transcriptions from hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscript letters and diaries in British libraries, the Public Record Office and private archives. His generosity in sharing the results of his research with other students and scholars became all ...”

“... caused a stir of approval in this country, while also raising doubts. In a recent New Left Review Benedict Anderson made sharp criticisms of the work of the journalist and poet James Fenton in which a comparison with that of Kapuściński was noted: you were left with the sense of two talented crisis-fancying literary tourists. Kapuściński exercises a ...”

“... Time of Darkness and a Time of Light’, one of eight essays collected in Language and Power, Benedict Anderson offers a beautifully crafted reading of this memoir. Kenang-Kenangan is quite different from autobiographies familiar in the West. Only a modest proportion of it is devoted to the protagonist; nor does the manuscript chronicle individual ...”

“... scripts of the earliest Middle Ages, with a sleek and limpid Caroline minuscule that anyone can read today after a few minutes’ practice. More than two-thirds of the ancient Latin literature we have today was in circulation under Charlemagne’s heirs in the ninth century, and not much that enjoyed a Carolingian revival was subsequently lost. But the ...”

“... clause, that as long as you’re reading it, you’re dreaming of the movie version. Picture Benedict Cumberbatch hunched over a legal pad, sweating lightly, pressing Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Jared Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is ...”

“... into their own dreams and vanities: their great hearts were not on display. Did Wittgenstein read P.G. Wodehouse? Probably not, but had he done so he might have got on with him very well, as he did with the conventions of early cinema. With such things you knew where you were, and a philosopher likes that: Gilbert Ryle, so it is said, thought ...”

“... no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ‘stories’, and episodes from his own encounters with Fleming. The book is a trifle disjointed, but by no means without interest to students ...”

“... through luminescent language. Lines from his short stories fizzle in the memory years after we read them. There’s the Grandmaster in his collection Walking the Dog, described – in a curiously Irish way – as ‘leaning down confidently, pointing out the sins, advising for the future’. His favoured forms have been the short story and the novella (he ...”

“... probably take with them the tendency to leave everything ‘barren’ and ‘ravaged’. Widely read in his lifetime, Humboldt remained famous for at least a generation after his death. His contemporaries Goethe and Darwin admired him; so would Thoreau and John Muir. Many places and things in the natural world now bear his name: a current in the Pacific ...”

“... Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and throughout the Deep South, the battlefield at Gettysburg, Hollywood or even the foggy menace of Seattle. The Hudson Valley’s hills ...”

“... I searched out lives of great women. Some of my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie mingled with Albert Schweitzer and Davy Crockett; their stirring words were blazoned in balloons, against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In ...”

“... surely sighing, ‘this is going to be a story in a kitsch language about kitsch and I refuse to read it.’ Well, guess what – you have no choice! How many centuries has it been since Western culture peaked? Two, maybe three? Do you really expect anyone, not just me, but anyone to write a story in 2005 that will tell you something you didn’t know about ...”

“... of dead animals. Turning sheep and calves into parchment is a messy, smelly business. But when we read medieval texts in print editions all that mess disappears – so we no longer see what the authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material. As the Word ...”