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“... or the lives of others.’ Wilde’s hyperbole here is a form of self-aggrandisement which, in Reading Gaol, can be forgiven. But I do not think it can be forgiven in a biographer. The truth of the matter may lie closer to hand. Although we no longer think of inversion as a ‘curse’, it is really the only one the Queensberries can accurately lay claim ...”

“... novels would doubtless wince at being called ‘new adults’, yet two of the books bear a seal reading ‘a book for new adults’ and all of them carry, for better and for worse, didactic overtones. Death, sex, disease, unhappy families and divorce are no longer forbidden territory in writing for children: the admirable intention is that the world of ...”

“... at an auction without consulting a catalogue, one would have thought harder about a work before reading the evidence for and against. But it isn’t a game. In the visual arts anxiety about authenticity is endemic for good reasons. There is embarrassment when an attribution won’t stick if money was spent – public money in the case of the National ...”

“... similar in subject-matter, and not very different in appearance and technique. But the modern reading of White’s album drawings – they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was ...”

“... closer to those of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s functionaries. Laud (the son of a Reading cloth merchant and, like the king, a short man) looks at the painter with raised eyebrows – maybe he will be glad when the session is over. In a double portrait, Wentworth appears determined; his secretary, pen in hand, looks at him wide-eyed, as though ...”

“... wasn’t much interest at first. I tried to get some volunteers by talking about the project at a reading in honour of the trilingual Galloway poet Willie Neill. There was a polite but frosty atmosphere, and afterwards a woman took me aside and said I might get a better response if my approach were less ‘bouncy’.I had more success the next day, after I ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association – you can’t, as a warmly sympathetic biographer of Freud, do-better than that. The sheer amount of biographical, historical and psychoanalytical detail that has gone into the making of this Life is, as far as I can see, unparalleled in the literature of its subject; and so are the care and informed intelligence with which this stupendous mass of facts, conjectures and speculations has been sifted, as well as the attractive, good-humoured and unstrenuous way most of it has been presented ...”

“... I think it likely – or slightly more than likely – that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks ...”

“... for siuzhet is also “plot”.’ This makes perfect sense in spite of the mischief, and echoes Peter Brooks’s thought in Reading for the Plot (1984), still the indispensable book on this subject: ‘“Plot” … seems to me to cut across the fabula/siuzhet distinction … Plot could be thought of as the interpretive ...”

“... Freud, as did so many others in Freud’s circle, through a book. But it was not love at first reading: a physician specialising in psychiatry, Ferenczi found The Interpretation of Dreams lacking in scientific rigour. But once he learned of the severely empirical manner in which, in their rigorous word-association experiments, Jung and his colleagues in ...”

“... house-like Barcelona Pavilion (computer graphics are supplied, so that even those who don’t like reading plans can have a go). The single family house is not a simple apprentice task for an architect: home life demands at least as much ingenuity in planning as office life. Imagining what it would be like to live in a house is more intriguing than imagining ...”

“... her hip, are put into poses which suggest informality, amiability and mutual comfort. Mr and Mrs Peter Perez Burdett are altogether stranger; the portrait Wright painted as a gift hadn’t, until now, been outside Prague since the subjects’ daughter took it there on her marriage. The husband – young, lively, in casual bright clothes – contrasts with ...”

“... than what a lot of people who thought they were overtaking them in the years between have managed. Reading the funny letters Minton wrote, and applying their tone of voice to the things people who knew him remember, makes it clear why he had many friends, and why his downward spiral into alcoholism, and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love ...”

“... be a very difficult subject) and the redundant descriptions should not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but ...”