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“... in the Cold War … is hard to imagine.’There​ are other ways of telling the story. To turn to Peter Reddaway’s memoir of his work with the dissidents is to move not only in time – his story starts in the 1960s and runs through to 1991 – but also to another emotional register, one of high idealism on the part of altruistic Westerners. To be sure, the ...”

“... life, most of them rare visitors except for Joan Rodker, in whose flat Doris had lived with Peter, her four-year-old son, while they organised demonstrations and international ‘peace’ meetings. If anyone asked later if she’d been a member of the Communist Party, Doris would give a deep sigh at having to tell it yet again, and explain she was never ...”

“... with his discovery – or was it entombment? – by Sartre. It is recorded that when Genet first read Saint Genet, he was cast into deep despair, an emotion shared by many others who have tried to read Sartre’s massive study. But being a practical man he was not one to reject attention. What is extraordinary about ...”

“... sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s a surreal blur or suspending it, leaving ...”

“... besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in ...”

“... from her notebook and pinning them to the beach with pebbles. It’s offered, and has duly been read, as a visual metaphor for an unspeakable loss – one of those moments when cinema aspires to the poetic. The film is full of such images: the blast of a Tube train and the mêlée of the platform stand in for Iris’s linguistic disorientation, her face ...”

“... the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and ...”

“... even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his paintings, but Robb’s book provides ...”

“... until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite ...”

“... from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the period, I naively assumed that the food the Bennetts had eaten at Halliday Place was much the same as the food everyone ate in the war, regardless of social status. So I was still capable of being shocked in my twenties when I ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... of modern pigs show animals which at least are not a burden to themselves. If pigs could read they would be encouraged by Wiseman’s suggestion that outdoor systems may prove to have advantages over intensive piggeries, and interested to find that studies in Edinburgh into alternative methods of pig-raising which ‘allow the animals to express ...”

“... some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of the unemployed, of slate-scaled terraces of back-to-backs snaking under slate-grey skies – grainy sooty pictures of gritty sooty surfaces – have earned a ...”