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“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... time. And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs acknowledging, because as I read Mary Whitehouse’s letters, everything about her, except the trim tailoring, reminded me of my wicked stepmother.* There was the same quivering, tight-lipped prissiness, the untroubled moral righteousness, a desire for the respectable and normal so ...”

“... of women weeping as they recover the details of their alien abductions: all they had to do was read them in order to get the anatomy right. We’re talking three fingers here, not six; aliens have no knuckles, no knees and no muscular structure. Their mouths never open. Above all, aliens never ever have sexual organs and a pregnant alien, like the one we ...”

“... history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to imagine any other inexperienced and late-beginning writer not starting from ...”

“... The first picture in Richard Avedon’s folio is captioned ‘Alan Silvey, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada’. Such photographs were taken in the Dustbowl fifty years ago. But this is art, not documentation. We have learned a lot about photography since the Thirties, and now no one believes that truth is simple – ‘all photographs are accurate ...”

“... at variance with any known English usage, one can hazard a guess at the intended meaning: if you read ‘projected’ for ‘pivoted’, ‘exemplars’ for ‘pawns’, ‘rejected’ (or possibly ‘parodied’) for ‘parroted’, ‘influential’ for ‘inferential’, then at least you get sense; one must hope that it is the sense Macleod wanted. Other ...”

“... Return to Camelot is a model of intelligent and responsible popularisation, a constant pleasure to read. But it does not venture beneath the lively surface. No concession to academic solemnity, let alone any faith in the truth-revealing powers of psychohistory, would have been necessary to confront the question that hovers over every page: why this persistent ...”

“... also a bloodless book. There are few quotations, and the biographical sketches Stevenson provides read as if they had been taken from official obituaries. Nevertheless, the way people experienced the war was vitally important. As Hitler lay in his hospital bed, struggling to find an explanation for Germany’s defeat – according to his account in Mein Kampf ...”

“... people there protested against the loss of the last of its parks. A Blessing in Disguise can be read as a critique of the utopian planners like Le Corbusier or Fritz Schumacher, but it’s hard to extract any consistent argument from its pages, partly because the authors often ramble on, repeat themselves, digress and get stuck on side issues, and partly ...”

“... most extraordinary material presented by Stargardt, explicit sexual memories and fantasies. They read stories and sang songs as a distraction from the horror, tedium and privation of their daily existence. They congratulated themselves on lucky escapes and reported with a variety of feelings, ranging from exultation to regret and occasionally guilt, their ...”

“... all of Scholem’s scholarly apparatus, which has the advantage of making his book easier to read, but the disadvantage that we don’t know what the sources are for various elements in the story. In Scholem’s telling, the development of the great messianic movement within the Ottoman Empire took place without any influence from the broader Christian ...”

“... extensive list of unpublished documents consulted in German archives and published primary sources read in libraries in Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg and elsewhere. Over the eight years he took to research and write the book, Kurlander hoovered up everything even remotely connected with the topic. His argument unfolds logically and consistently. And there are ...”

“... important as the two-dimensional image. There are plenty of details in the exhibition catalogue by Richard Brettell (Yale, £16.95) which help you appreciate what is going on at brush-stroke level, but to test what is said you must go to the paintings themselves.In the pictures on show the size of the marks is large in relation to the size of the canvas and ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... shadows and onto the platform. At 32, the former boot boy was a man among men. Or, that’s how Richard Allen might choose to break in a new face in one of his New English Library Skinhead shockers. It’s an Allen pulp hologram that Stewart Home is impersonating. But impersonation is too weak a term for this stranglehold on the mike. It is more like a ...”