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“... the strong green of the Penguin Crime paperback. The novel was probably twenty years old when I read it, fifty years or so ago – it was first published in 1951, when Tey was in her mid-fifties. A twenty-year-old book can still feel contemporary, but seventy years old in book-time is ancient history. The Daughter of Time has never been out of print, and ...”

“... produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private diary of David Peterley now for the first time printed’, opened in June 1930 as ...”

“... accomplished and engaging survey of the literary side of Anglo-Saxon England. It should be read by anyone interested in the place of Old English in the larger corpus of English literature. The editors have included essays from 12 contributors besides themselves on most aspects of a literature extending from the seventh century to the 12th. The first ...”

“... their own author. In aristocratic circles authorship was attributed to one of their own – Sir Richard Vyvyan was a popular candidate at fashionable metropolitan soirées when the sensation was at its height, and the name of Prince Albert was, according to one account, also suggested. In ecclesiastical circles any one of a number of free-thinking radicals ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”

“... in hardback. Wodehouse did the job and he produced a balanced story, fast and funny. I have read more than one of his ‘one-shotters’ and then read the full-length originals. One prefers the full-length, of course. But the potted flower is in all essentials the good Wodehouse floribundus of the garden. Quick ...”

“... rate!’ They exchanged views, mostly congenial, on various topics of the day. But these can be read much more extensively in their books, and the interest of their correspondence lies chiefly in its preservation of personal and domestic details. Ruskin’s regard for Carlyle took practical forms. He brought eggs from Denmark Hill, a print of Dürer’s ...”

“... of translations of his essays and interviews, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) can be read as cancelling and replacing Foucault’s earlier attempt to state the method and goal of his historical writing: The Archaeology of Knowledge, his stuffiest, most obscure and worst book. Especially in the interviews. Power/Knowledge is remarkably ...”

“... Clearly, for Martin Amis, enough is nothing like enough. To read him is to discover an author as voracious as his characters: like Terry in Success, who specifies that ‘I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money ...”

“... of their own day. Some of them were, but the majority of the authors who were most widely read and respected by their contemporaries have all but disappeared from critical view. Often assisted by income from other professions or from inheritances, some made good livings. At a great economic and social distance from them were the wretched hacks who ...”

“... to facilitate just such dipping-in. Despite the textbook label, Art since 1900 is a book to be read through, and only sustained engagement can do justice to the sweep of such a minutely researched, elaborately theorised and multivocal text. The perfect reader, it would seem, must be already well informed about 20th-century avant-gardes – political and ...”

“... Kingsley Amis has admitted – with only a measure of self-parody – that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare ...”

“... embellishments – so that its large complement of significant, message-laden detail could be read inch by inch. Brown’s picture was a product of the easel, and by that much removed from the actual dusty (or muddy) London trench where it had begun. Like Turner and Constable, Scharf could not miss the spectacular opportunity for topical art furnished by ...”

“... once he takes up the pen. I thought at first that Conway Morris was merely forgetful, but as I read through the book with increasing amazement I realised that the exercise was as deliberate as it was detailed. The portrait of the past is doctored to serve the purpose of the present. Conway Morris tries to achieve a compromise between the vernacular and the ...”

“... per page (Winston Churchill’s entries include ‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations’; also ‘Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’). The first issue of the ODQ was in 1941, the second in 1953. The prefaces to this new third edition include ‘The Compilers to the ...”