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“... It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book, containing the 2,500 greatest thoughts. Hubbard went down in the Lusitania, but his book was advertised with great vigour for the benefit of tongue-tied partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche ...”

“... ale. I fell in with his plan. I had met the International Socialists. My new chum was called Peter Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert ...”

“... intention of ‘a layman’s Domesday Book the scholar can use, and a scholar’s the layman can read’. It is the first which presents the text in parallel translation, in county parts, for the entire document. The text has only once before been set and printed complete, in Farley’s edition, the preparation of which had taken 16 years. The surviving ...”

“... work which is offered to him is automatically deprived of the right to receive benefit’ (has Peter Lilley read these letters?). What of the international aspects of Stalin’s Communism? In his Foreword to the English-language edition, Robert Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the letters ‘bear ...”

“... related to the theme of two more weighty studies, Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent and Peter Brown’s The Body and Society. This theme is human sexuality. Until very recently, almost all Christians assumed without question that this would have no place in the world to come, where ‘they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the ...”

“... of the genesis and evolution of the whole project and a series of hints as to how it should be read. Letters is about the relationship of the past and the future: about the inevitability of re-enacting the past and the possibility of learning from it and improving on it. It is as though John Barth had set out to answer, at the mid-point of his career, the ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... Graves or Larkin would not dare to sing their words or act out their stories: if persuaded to read their work in public, they were shy and halting. David Bowie is not shy in that way: in the crowded arenas he physically enacted his own creation, Ziggy Stardust, ‘the leper messiah’, in song and spectacle, and he evoked a certain pity and terror from ...”

“... utopias’, which includes Rowland Vaughan (1610), Gabriel Plattes’s Macaria (1641), Peter Chamberlen’s The Poore Mans Advocate (1649), Peter Cornelius Plockhoy (1659), John Bellers’s Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (1695), and two essays by an anonymous Hermeticist, Philadept, published in 1698 ...”

“... there is a better reason for not having a ballot, one which Scargill and the NUM general secretary Peter Heathfield (especially the latter) used constantly, but which is not to be found in these two books. It is the differential problem: that a ballot on an issue which affects all miners equally is a reasonable proposition, while a ballot which affects ...”

“... her that … the true combat takes place elsewhere. It’s to hear this voice that she has read St Augustine her whole life, almost in secret’ – ‘almost in secret’ suggesting that she wasn’t quite sure who she wanted to be, or wanted to be seen to be, by herself in particular. Such choices, she would have found by reading Confessions, are ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”

“... Walk, scheduled to take place the next day. On the plane back to Los Angeles, where I live now, I read a little filler item about it, headlined ‘Boring Is Over, But Tunnel Still Dull.’ That summed it up. Yet, in a way, I was relieved. I had been invited to visit the Channel Tunnel shortly after the Northridge earthquake, which rampaged through our house ...”

“... which had faced Labour in 1964. Sir Denis is reserved about his own role in those years but, if we read between the lines, it is plain that he was most sceptical of the attempt to open a new chapter of pay policy in 1972 and, later, opposed to the course of confrontation on which the Government set itself with Phase Three, and held to in spite of the ...”

“... thousands who attended his meetings – yes, even in Sheffield – but to the millions who only read about them. Professional football was catching on as a spectator sport in much the same way. The politics of vicarious participation did not have to wait for the invention of the cathode-ray tube, even though poor Gladstone had to make do with newsprint to ...”