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“... Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does ...”

“... was a fairly junior member of the Telegraph’s staff for some years. As the author of the ‘Peter Simple’ column for thirty-odd years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met either, although I may have swapped punches or half-pints with one or other in the mid-Fifties, when I was one of the Daily Express interlopers in the ...”

“... Professor Sir Peter Strawson is properly honoured by the 12 essays written for this anthology. Unlike the papers in some other collections of this kind, most of these are addressed to issues in which Strawson has a serious interest and on which he has done substantial work. It is therefore delightful to find that Philosophical Subjects also contains Strawson’s replies to each of the essays presented to him ...”

“... of all’, however, proves to be a mistranscription of the original article: the proof-reading throughout is slovenly – ironically in a book which repeatedly comments on the punishingly high standards Britten always set himself. It is certain that the rest of the contributors, highly intelligent people including some of the world’s greatest ...”

“... to make more sense for her ‘novel’ means reorganising time. In one way she is setting up the reading of the book as a roman à clef, or throwing a cloak of visibility over her fictional characters, who we should suppose ghostlike, unnamed, not creatures of flesh and blood. It is not the third volume of her autobiography although I can’t remember anyone ...”

“... currently experiencing a major crisis of confidence and it is to this unhealthy condition that Re-Reading English is addressed. The contributors are collectively of the opinion that English literature is a dying subject and they argue that it can be revived by adopting a ‘socialist pedagogy’ and introducing into the syllabus ‘other forms of writing and ...”

“... about the author of Lucky Jim, if that still engaging novel is all one recalls of Amis, but reading or rereading a wider selection of his work alongside Leader’s sympathetic yet unsparing biography has driven me to brood not just on the relation between Amis the comic novelist and Amis the serial offender, but on the costs (that word again) of his ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... it exists in itself.’ As for the ‘Figure’, that plays a role, for example, in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, where the status of geometry poses problems for Deleuze in his attempt to find a contrast in Spinoza between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘fictitious’. The Figure clearly belongs to the order of abstraction, to ‘beings of reason’, yet ...”

“... around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression is grim. Being a literary critic is a serious business; he will make no attempt to charm us. Ellis is well aware of Leavis’s joyless reputation and ...”

“... eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He ...”

“... empathetically in the direction of an image of Adolf Hitler he has developed in his own mind after reading half a dozen books. But the task of Kershaw, who has immersed himself over decades in treatises and archival records, can scarcely be to sound out his own spiritual affinity with Hitler, it must rather be to understand what it was about him, even in his ...”

“... of the material in the direct possession of the Freud Archives, was undertaken in Jerusalem by Peter Swales; and the draft notes were prepared for the simultaneous German edition of the letters by Michael Schröter. Masson’s contribution was evidently to polish and edit the translation and to contribute those limited notes which he considered necessary ...”

“... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the ...”

“... If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition linking the Augustans and Romantics with the Moderns: a metropolitan tradition reflecting the state of Britain. This was not noticed because Tennyson, Browning and Arnold provided a greater ...”