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“... studying in the United States, he had been told, by his father, his teachers, by the books he read, that Oxford for the British was ‘like the Hardwar of the Hindus, the Mecca of the Muslims, the Golden Temple of the Sikhs’. To be an Oxford man was to enjoy a ‘state of being’ akin to the sublime. He also learned that, of all the Oxford ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... colleagues, inquiring which of these much discussed books of the day they and their spouses had read. The response was grim and philistine. Mann concludes: ‘interest in, and readership of, the modern literary novel is restricted to a very small minority of the population who are lucky to have supplies provided for them by a publicly financed ...”

“... of authorial posturing common in the 18th century and earlier, it comes as a kind of relief to read contemporary accounts of Sterne’s fame, including those deliriously provided in his own surviving letters. Sterne was hardly the first vain author, but he was perhaps the first major English writer who declined to play the old games of gentlemanly ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”

“... grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... to his own ‘transfixions’. And yet what feels artificial on the page may be oddly natural when read aloud. (Agee said that the whole book should be read aloud.) The idea of a rigorous accounting, as if to ratify an oral history that these people cannot speak themselves, is among his strongest motives. So one comes to ...”

“... own present inability, aged 50, to imagine what it is like to be 50. I’ve heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of 50-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn’t surprising. The 50 that I seek to understand is the same 50 I wondered about as a child, it has nothing much to do with having lived for ...”

“... for many years: it described the wrong kind of heroism.* Starving Leningraders, she wrote, read War and Peace for encouragement: Tolstoy’s characters were the best measure they could find for their own extraordinary feats of survival. Russian historians estimate that 27 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945 ...”

“... inheritances of Ulster: The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of ...”

“... influence of religious drama, on the other hand, is largely silent, in the sense that it cannot be read off from the page. It is there, not in the text, but in staging and situations, like the mocking of York before his murder in Henry VI Part 3, or in the readiness to have at the centre of a scene an actor who doesn’t speak and is therefore non-existent on ...”

“... my classes, I inevitably received a few complaints. Some have stuck in the memory. ‘He made us read a whole book by Hume.’ Or the student in a class on 19th-century intellectual history who grumbled about having to read books from the anthropology and biology sections of the library; surely that wasn’t part of a ...”