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“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into agreeing with their arguments while finding the students intensely annoying. It’s as though Edward is some demented great-uncle, deserving of much mockery and even dangerous in some ...”

“... her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place and they all live happily ever after. Diana didn’t see the possible twists in the narrative. What does Kate read? It’s a question. Kate seems to have ...”

“... forth. Some mesmeric staying power is obviously involved. In my adolescence, he was an obligatory read. I can still see the mid-1970s Penguin collection I carried around like a talisman: parallel English and French texts, the cover Carlos Schwabe’s painting Spleen et Idéal. OK, I confess: I fell hard for the Baudelaire mythos, while never quite getting the ...”

“... Appropriating Shakespeare at just as many points, but it isn’t a book I am planning to re-read in the immediate future, if ever. In most important respects Vickers is engaged in the same project as Foakes – the defence of the aesthetic and the author against the perceived excesses of post-structuralist criticism – but he adopts a procedure almost ...”

“... sitting in a single armchair together, and falling over backwards, but we are plainly invited to read in it some kind of epitaph. ‘My humour was gravity,’ the speaker says in this poem (‘Ancient Evenings’); but when you get too grave you end up on the floor. Of another relationship, the poet says with rueful delicacy: ‘We failed to betray ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”

“... is the result of my upbringing and background.’ The outcome is a work which it is a pleasure to read, even in places where one cannot agree. For believers in the ‘Two Cultures’, this writing by a scientist would be hard to classify. Freeman Dyson is a scientist of great distinction. He is best-known for his share in laying the foundations of quantum ...”

“... her own uninspired obstinacy, [John] would hand me the resulting manuscript ... and command me to read aloud ... having been asked if I was tired and told I was reading abominably and sometimes informed that I was ruining the beauty of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds.’ But no ...”

“... a sentence found in the foreword to the present book: ‘Harold Evans, assisted by Oscar Turnill, read through the entire volume with a brilliant editorial eye; they taught me what skilled and intelligent editing can contribute to organisation and to lightening prose.’ Obviously the book’s main claim to attention must be based on the importance of the ...”

“... their subject only as native speakers. Miss Manners, by contrast, claims to have majored in (i.e., read) Gracious Living at a prestigious women’s university, Wellesley College, one of the fabled Seven Sisters – or Heavenly Seven – which also include Bryn Mawr and Smith and, perhaps for historical reasons, the now mixed Vassar. A review of the Guide in ...”

“... other people were supposed to inhabit. And within Belknap’s book the formulation allows him to read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as both lurid and subtle at the same time, a feat not too many critics have achieved. Raskolnikov is not living a double life; he is caught up in two incompatible plots, the one he has devised for himself, and the one ...”

“... go on turning the pages’. The prejudice is unsurprising; one of the inevitabilities of having to read more than a hundred novels concertinaed over a summer is that novels without much plot tend to languish. Suddenly everything should be shorter, even Ian McEwan. More troubling was Professor Carey’s opinion that Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good is ‘a very ...”

“... out about the types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition and to read them in order to throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood.’ It is a vast subject (what work of art or literature doesn’t have something to say about metamorphosis?) but also an elusive one, as Warner is well aware, comparing herself to ...”

“... translation from Voltaire, the pentameter couplets are balanced in fine Augustan fashion; but they read like second-hand Pope. Hecht imitating Pope is never as good as Pope imitating Pope, partly because Hecht feels it necessary to sneak in a groaner or two: ‘How shall this best of orders come to be?/I am all ignorance, like a PhD.’ Such long poems are ...”