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“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... I was reading in a coffee shop a couple of months ago when a young man asked if he might take my photograph. I said that I would rather he didn’t – which was churlish, because I have taken pictures of strangers myself. I was rude, I guess, because the more wonderfully apt and sensitive his picture of a grumpy, grey-haired man reading might be the less I wanted that man to be me ...”

“... LRB reaches you the new British Library at St Pancras will be open – or rather, the Humanities Reading Room will be. For the Rare Books Reading Room you must wait until February 1998, for the Oriental and India Office Collections Reading Areas until August, and for the Manuscripts ...”

“... ends of the spectrum of style, but in both cases graphic design allows scanning (as against reading), and allows those buyers who read very little of the continuous text to feel that they have had their money’s worth from the paper. The ingredients of the graphic style which Brody gave The Face included ‘abstract’ Bauhaus-like alphabets, headlines ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Service in England is being dismantled. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the radio or reading the newspapers. As so often, you have to look beyond the headlines about pressures on funding and the junior doctors’ dispute to find out what’s really going on. In 1990, Kenneth Clarke introduced an internal market into the NHS, following on from the ...”

“... organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council. In the gallery alongside a new reading room there is currently a display of letters, books, catalogues, paintings and drawings relating to the Whitechapel Boys: the group of Jewish painters and writers (they included David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg) who met in ...”

“... moment can take on the colour of a mood as much as the colour of the garden you remember. But if a reading is not expected, why the titles? The encouragement they give to Pateresque excursions into narrative commentaries is, perhaps, one reason Hodgkin has had more perceptive and appreciative attention from writers than from art critics. In a book of pieces ...”

“... to a flattened existence.The reader first glimpses Ivan through the eyes of his older brother, Peter. ‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad,’ the novel begins, eavesdropping on Peter’s internal monologue, ‘That suit at the funeral.’ Peter, a human rights barrister, is ten ...”

“... By a happy chance I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It acclimatises one to the dramas and Oriental dreams which figure in the exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (at Tate Britain until 11 May). It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day ...”

“... I have been reading again The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Barbara Reynolds says that this book – together with her famous series of radio dramas The Man Born to be King – is her greatest work. And Barbara Reynolds should know. She is the goddaughter of Sayers; she is a distinguished Italian scholar and collaborated with Sayers on her translation of The Divine Comedy (a collaboration fascinatingly written up in her book The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L ...”

“... of Böttgher and Palissy make clear, Smiles’s heroes are not all Englishmen (though they are, as Peter Sinnema says, almost all male and European). Napoleon I does not always come out poorly from the frequent comparisons with the Duke of Wellington, and Smiles pointedly praises la carrière ouverte aux talents characteristic of the French but not of the ...”

“... imperialism gets a free pass). Among the signatories were the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar who worked on the communications staff for Trump’s National Security Council, and Charlie Kirk, a star of conservative talk radio and founder of the Trumpist student movement Turning Point. On the eve of NatCon ...”

“... Rivers, he began to develop the literary-critical technique that would come to be called close reading, where you tease out the multiple semantic possibilities of words. Rivers’s roughly Freudian theory was that the dream symbols of his shellshocked patients reflected a compromise between two conflicting wishes. Graves adapted this into an idea about the ...”

“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”