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“... Elderfield’s catalogue essay ‘Seeing Bonnard’, about the way the paintings are scanned and read, contributes to their demythologising. Elderfield takes for granted the pleasures afforded by the paintings: his text is rewarding if you are curious about what goes on between brain and eye when you look at a painting, or if you are interested in the ...”

“... guy she planned to install as a building supervisor. It took the foreman twenty minutes just to read out the verdicts. Indiana’s first contribution is to give the story a quiet start. A relatively quiet start: he gives you the fraud and the theft before he gives you the murder and the incest. His second is to suppress the trial – although his narrative ...”

“... a single pregnant line: Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas? – a question which can be read as asking either whether ‘Lesbian Sappho’ taught girls how to love, or how to love girls. Sappho’s erotic predilections have remained a stumbling block for many, to be explained away or desexualised: witness the late 19th century’s interpretation ...”

“... alarmingly well informed – if there was a recent study of a topic under discussion he had often read and digested it, even if his officials hadn’t yet got hold of it,’ one civil servant recalled. ‘And he was exceptionally open minded and ready to pick up ideas wherever he could.’ He would read eclectically, and ...”

“... of the Tin Tent During the first push on the Somme a temporary captain in the Royal Engineers – Peter Nissen a Canadian designed an experimental steel tent that could be erected from stacked materials by an NCO and eight men in 110 minutes so the Nissen hut is the descendant and enriched relation of the Elephant and other similar steel structures that were ...”

“... this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it. The novel is a satire of ...”

“... and self-serving, he gives vent to his long-standing resentment against what he chose to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of his own, and it is essential to be aware of them, preferably by reading this journal in ...”

“... Outer Maroo ‘is thick with coded messages, but the messages are legible only to those who can read the secretive earth’. This requires a tipping of the bush-hat to aboriginal culture, though the Murris have moved out for the duration of the story, apart from Ethel, who ‘sits there, cross-legged in the red dust at the edge of the bora rings, smiling to ...”

“... fingertips of individual submarine commanders, out of touch with the rest of the world, forced to read the meaning of silence. How should ordinary people react to the prospect of these calamities? In my view, the avoidance of nuclear warfare is a consideration of overriding priority – something more important than national sovereignty, ‘face’ or ...”

“... that early morning, 5 September 1957, when he walked to the news-stand at 66th and Broadway to read Gilbert Millstein’s review in the New York Times: ‘Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The sun also rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of ...”

“... Trevelyan’s tiresomeness, of course, ran in the family. What Strachey could not swallow when he read Macaulay – ‘A preposterous optimism fills his pages’ – was the Whig interpretation of history at full strength. It smacked of Victorian smugness, and one can practically feel Strachey’s knee jerk. His own values set the cosmopolitan French ...”

“... though they worshipped Sarapis and married their sisters, continued to speak, to write and to read Greek. Now and again they threw away their books and papers; rubbish-dumps built up around the town; sand drifted in from the desert, and covered the dumps; and there they remained, preserved by the rainless climate, until 1897. Then the archaeologists ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... poem a ‘symbolic vision of the salvation of civilisation’, and I suppose one might conceivably read it as related to the end of the Great War, but in fact there is no civilisation in the poem, or, for that matter, in the rest of Campbell’s work: his outsider’s vision did not encompass anything so collective and humane as civilised values. The poem is ...”

“... having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della ...”