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“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... and his own guilt-stained history with Alma. Desmond, Laura’s second husband, and Peter, the editor who both loves and is terrorised by his favourite writer, maintain an uneasy comradeship. Once again we are inside a social world on the brink of disintegration. This time, though, Fox seems far more sanguine about the splintering. Laura may be ...”

“... despair. It is possible, with practice, to learn to hear contrapuntal music, especially if you can read music and follow a score. Then you will see as well as hear how, for instance, in the first fugue of the ‘48’, one of the 16 fugues that Kerman analyses in some detail, the first seven notes of the subject are inverted – turned upside down – in two ...”

“... a human link between the two adventurers, and rather more to the story. Another old Himalaya hand, Peter Steele, now tells it well, and puts right a longstanding injustice. Toiling up mountains for sport is, beyond any doubt, a British invention. People who live among mountains – the Sherpas of Nepal, for instance – can see no sense in it. Mountain ...”

“... her anxious friends. The days were yet to come of a doctor’s being quizzed by patients who had read the latest preposterously sanguine article in one or other digest magazine. Another consideration that worked for the doctor was that patients did get better – some of them, anyway – for ‘there are very few illnesses like rabies that kill all ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn’t read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument ...”

“... the inquiry looked at 720 locations where polonium traces were found, heard from 62 witnesses and read through 5000 pages of evidence. Appendix 12 – not included in the published report – contained the evidence given behind closed doors under the Official Secrets Act. It presumably included evidence from Litvinenko’s handler at MI6, whom he used to meet ...”

“... profound!’ and ‘what nonsense!’ we think at one and the same time, just as we do when we read Blake’s own annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses or Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels. What you shouldn’t do is begin your biography with a paragraph like this: William Blake, poet and artist, is one of the most important and controversial ...”

“... is that the strategy would tell us nothing about how Hogarth’s pictures were intended to be read, only about how they might perhaps have been read. For Paulson, however, it is a strategy that offers immediate access to a subtext whose meanings are fully intended by the artist. ‘The popular or ...”

“... in keeping with the man he has become 30 years later when he writes this memoir. Hanna likes being read to, and Michael reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our ...”

“... encountered Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. One wag (I still regret it wasn’t me) put up his hand and said: ‘Sir, if Orwell just scrambled the digits in 1948 to get 1984, can I call my dystopia “1977”?’ Most people of my generation ...”

“... among them) to the political and cultural circumstances of 1621,1 since nowadays these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed ...”

“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”