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“... is light, the rules are tough. The last line could be his credo as a poet, but it is possible to read it slightly otherwise than he intends us to. The tough rules are to be used as redemptive agents for the ‘prosaic voice’ he claims is his own true poetic tone. Lapidary work on metre, rhyme and stanza will take the place of that inspiration or afflatus ...”

“... Totemic fame has its price. Eponymous labels can be misleading. Economists who have never actually read any of the works of Keynes and Schumpeter nonetheless confidently invoke their names in identifying stylised concepts; and it is pointless to complain about this sort of professional shorthand. For those who like longhand, however, there is more to be ...”

“... Ha, ha, ha. That was exactly the sound I made there at the table – Ha, ha, ha – as if I’d read somewhere how to laugh.The family knows what the reader learns only gradually, that he is driven by complimentary urges: he dreams of stability and harmony, tries in vain to provide them, and wants to atone for his sins, to repair the violence done in ...”

“... and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.’ Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987) got the same kind of treatment; even Stella Rimington rubbishes it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of J.M. Barrie’s ‘Lost Boys’, in later life called Peter Pan ‘that terrible masterpiece’. Brigid Brophy, having reread Little Women and its sequels, dried her eyes and blown her nose, resolved that ‘the only honourable course was to come out into the open and admit that the dreadful books are masterpieces ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... Venetian buildings and their history he is able to expand terse notes into likely conjectures, and read social history in a pattern of payments. These are as much histories of what went on as of what went up. Both books are at their best when putting you in the shoes of the passers-by who saw the Louvre colonnade and the Cà d’Oro rise. You stand alongside ...”

“... in precisely that line; and of the new kinds of painting that followed – you can, if you like, read them as glosses, variations, sometimes caricatures of what he did – none combine truth to the nature of the physical world and skill in the art of painting to the same degree, but some are more powerful. Cézanne made still-life monumental at the expense ...”

“... who in the late 1530s or early 1540s became so excited on hearing the New Testament being read to him in English that he decided he would have to learn to read it for himself, did so, purchased his own New Testament, told his mother off for worshipping the crucifix, and for his pains was nearly murdered by his irate ...”

“... the man against his times, the man in the round, as seen by a scholar and admirer, will want to read Mr Williams’s own full-length portrait. The diary is, moreover, incomplete in a number of crucial respects. First, it falls silent on 9 October 1956. Thus it excludes many – indeed most – of the major and traumatic events of the Gaitskell ...”

“... in history arises in this way, explicitly or implicitly, and historians would be less widely read if they did not cater for it. Yet their own professional concerns, so they disdainfully affirm, are otherwise. Their lack of interest in the vulgarisation of their discipline is not just a matter of snobbery: it is a matter of fashion. For by the time works ...”

“... yawn. Farewell to the working class? By the time of the Labour Party Conference I’d had time to read the 1983 Election study, How Britain votes which explodes the notion that class-voting is on the wane. This is a good example of my appearance-reality theorem. The idea that home ownership, consumerism, holidays abroad, were undermining class solidarity had ...”

“... by the accidental colouring, and the work was finished. Contemporary comments (which can be read picture by picture in Butlin and Joll) show that even his most daring effects were understood by an appreciable number of his contemporaries: it is arrogant to assume that passing time has necessarily given us better access to his work. It ...”

“... appetite and breadth of response were very wide – his collecting shows this – and one comes to read his complaints of his own inadequacy as a confession of the impossibility of absorbing and combining aspects of all the work he admired. There was, to start with, the problem of reconciling tonal and linear methods of representation. In one classical ...”