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“... killing me.’ The Education Secretary was, unsurprisingly, sharply criticised; not least by Peter Jones, a Spectator columnist, who told the BBC that ‘a calm, reasoned and balanced judgment would put it down to pig ignorance and blind prejudice’ – open-eyed prejudice being, I suppose, more to his taste. This is too harsh. What Clarke said was that ...”

“... and assessment, and they are generously illustrated with quotations, many of them in Greek. Peter Levi’s history purposes to give ‘a short lucid description in easy, continuous prose of most of ancient Greek literature’. The description is again accompanied by critical reflections and illustrated by frequent quotations (all in English ...”

“... Blake stops and Frye starts, claimed to have wound the string and rediscovered ‘the lost art of reading poetry’, presumably to be found at Heaven’s gate. But it seemed improbable that anybody would catch the end of the string in this show. The exhibits are dimly lit (no doubt in the interests of preservation) and the captions not much above ...”

“... on this subject are the two Michaels, Portillo and Howard, whose fathers were both immigrants, and Peter Lilley, whose holidays in his house in France enabled him to break into colloquial French in the course of a ludicrous comic turn about foreigners coming to this country to partake of the social services which he is assiduously dismantling. As always when a ...”

“... us. I suspect that, among the stories that Kafka or his Dog had in mind, were those of Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826). At all events, Kafka called Hebel’s ‘Unexpected Reunion’ the ‘most wonderful story in the world’, and the judgment does not strike one as absurd. Hebel’s stories, or parables, first appeared in the Lutheran almanac for the ...”

“... Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘a police state run by men who never finished high school’. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was controlled by the corrupt, gerrymandering state governor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, variously described as the Hillbilly Dictator, a ‘bible-bashing bastard’ and – by himself – as ‘a bushfire raging out of control ...”

“... another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster ...”

“... happened.’ She said, when told Mitchell’s treatment of neurasthenia had changed as a result of reading it: ‘If that is a fact I have not lived in vain.’ Gilman believed that the planning of living spaces put a limit on the advancement of women. Nothing which has happened since suggests that she was wrong in supposing that if there are kitchens women ...”

“... was that a significant group of literate, but not professionally literary, people found themselves reading this novel, which Jill Kitson had praised as a great act of courage on the part of a young Ukrainian woman who was exposing the fact that her own family contained war criminals, one of whom – if the novel was any guide – had almost been prosecuted for ...”

“... 1965, I have not seen a study of Early Modern Europe which so insistently demands an allegorical reading (though the translator offers no assistance to readers unfamiliar with contemporary Italian politics). The apertura for which Galileo was working echoes the famous apertura a sinistra of a few years ago. The Jesuits, Redondi’s bêtes noires, are ...”

“... nonetheless, as having a tendency to do so which is thwarted by its imperfect operation. On this reading, the exact reason hardly matters: ‘Indeed, examples of “frictions” and “rigidities” can be multiplied at will – any factor which causes the market to work imperfectly will do.’ This analysis is not only more radical than Coddington’s ...”

“... contemporaries found too much is extremely impressive. ‘In truth,’ Fabio Colonna wrote, ‘the reading is really difficult and troublesome.’ What he finds among the learned classical citations and modern scientific observations is that the Pope is like the king bee (the biology still needed to be sorted). ‘If you should irritate his sting, flee,’ one ...”

“... rectitude, but of genuinely and totally convincing himself.’ Or one might say, especially after reading Enoch at 100, that Powell’s ability to convince himself of his rectitude has continued to convince ...”

“... this gives a hint of the main reason he has so far failed to catch on with today’s reading public – ‘nothing shows better how far, beginning in the fourth century, literature moved away from the public arena, to become the property of a private, very often subsidised, intellectual minority, than the pervasive educated taste for Callimachus ...”

“... as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ‘reading as a man’ requires no attention. As a result, much male feminist criticism has inadvertently reproduced patriarchal attitudes to women, appropriating or challenging the ...”