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“... his father’s annoyance. He liked the smell of his grandfather’s pipe and, even before he could read them, the feel and presence of the many books on the shelves. Ashbery’s father was a vigorous man who had been a semi-pro baseball player. His son hated sport and physical exertion of any kind, particularly farmwork. Once he had learned to ...”

“... dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the ...”

“... almost be called thrillers, their plots resembling sensational news items. With Norman Lewis we read of plans to assassinate statesmen in Egypt and Libya, with evil American agents blackmailing honest Britishers. John Collee tells of a wonder cure for cancer devised by a Hindu mystic in a Scottish city where surgeons’ knives are used too readily and ...”

“... new-look Penguin Classics. I thought for a moment about taking the LRB’s review copy to read on the plane. But only for a moment. How long will it be before they start to ask at check-in: ‘Did you pack your bags yourself? Are you carrying any sharp objects in your cabin luggage? Nail-scissors? Razor-blades? A copy of the Koran?’ Setting off the ...”

“... Of the thousands​ of people who visited the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician and clergyman Richard Napier around the beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often ...”

“... and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our regular weekly visits. I had learned to read quite early when I was five or six by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy ...”

“... can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself ...”

“... Western text apart from the Bible. This makes it difficult – perhaps uniquely difficult – to read. Critical opinion is deeply entrenched, and most of it sounds as though it were originally uttered by retired colonels. He is ‘the father of the West’ (Haeker); ‘the classic of all Europe’ (Eliot); and, worst of all, a panegyrist of empire: ‘the ...”

“... It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be ...”

“... the eye of the brunette. He had no special mission like James Bond. He didn’t play the lute or read Le Monde. Why was it he on whom their sights were set? For let’s make no mistake, the women pick Which men go down in history as avid Tail-chasers with the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy ...”

“... who has one shows me the rings of Saturn or the mountains of the Moon and I was carried away by Richard Holmes’s account in The Age of Wonder of the heroic campaigns of observation and telescope-making carried out by Herschel and his sister. In the 1950s I was gripped by descriptions of the casting and polishing of the 200-inch mirror of the Hale ...”

“... for assisting the Germans in the extermination of the French Jews. The first book in French I ever read which was not a schoolbook was Guillain de Bénouville’s Le Sacrifice du Matin. With that song of courage and patriotism ringing in my ears, I visited France for the first time, at the age of 15, and rode rusty trains creeping over half-repaired bridges to ...”

“... he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers’s first novel. The title, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like ...”

“... with an Associated Press dispatch, not with the slow unfolding of generations. Nobody wants to read elaborate descriptions of things that might have happened, but didn’t, decades ago.’ The fact is that no prediction of the shape of the modern novel could have been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and ...”

“... is past. In a few lucid pages on the ‘anthropology of ecological science’ that should be read in the funding councils, he explains the damage done by the short-termism of modern universities in search of ratings, prodded into mutual competition instead of collaboration, demanding that academics publish quick results in journals instead of making ...”