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“... culture’ and a ‘print culture’. These two long books are contributions to this movement. Adrian Johns’s is very long, for he has a great deal to cover. The Nature of the Book displays a breadth of insight and of learning astonishing in a work produced in early career. There is no mistaking its stature or importance. Yet the work is ...”

“... property was over. Makers of ideas would henceforth have to live on prestige alone. In Adrian Johns’s account, intellectual property rights have always been precarious. According to him, the concepts of intellectual property and intellectual piracy arose as delayed responses to the advent of printing and the development of a commercial book ...”

“... importance of the printing press (in The Nature of the Book, published earlier this year, Adrian Johns argues that the ‘printing revolution’ was the ‘retrospective creation’ of 18th-century historians of the press).Morrison’s Gutenberg isn’t even interesting, let alone sympathetic. He loses Ennelina, the love of his life, not because ...”

“... in a public house of promiscuous, face-to-face talk and unregulated cheap print was explosive. As Adrian Johns has noted, ‘the alliance of coffee and print transformed authorship, communication and conversation.’ But precisely because coffee houses were places where people freely spoke their minds on matters that were supposed to be none of their ...”

“... at once wholly natural and deeply problematic in Restoration scientific circles. As Rob Iliffe and Adrian Johns have shown, it was the norm for mechanics and tradesmen vigorously to contest intellectual property rights and to withhold secrets that might lead to financial gain: after all, their business was at stake. Mathematicians followed similar ...”

“... the history of reading will experience flashes of self-recognition. Some book historians, like Adrian Johns writing on Renaissance scientific books or Ann Blair on early modern information overload, set out to trace a genealogy for present-day scholarly exchange; others, like Joan Rubin or Jonathan Rose, look outwards to the ‘common ...”

“... his academic friends and colleagues deserted Watson in his hour of need, when he was kicked out of Johns Hopkins. Watson very largely dismissed philosophy, at least as an activity he could or wished to understand, so that the comparative lack of philosophical appreciation here (Ryle’s Concept of Mind is not mentioned) may be appropriate. And yet his ...”

“... The pack thins and the stayers are revealed in the lead (Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Adrian Berg, for example). With so many of the tedious political attitudes of the artists of the Sixties discredited, those who have been slow to slough them off (following Kitaj’s example once again) have found themselves disqualified. If this seems like ...”

“... and Poussin are my cup of tea.’ This may be a joke. He does cite with approval a remark of Adrian Stokes to the effect that ‘modern art, the art typical of our day, is the slang, so to speak, of art as a whole, standing in relation to the Old Masters as does slang to ordinary language,’ adding that Picasso’s last works are an apotheosis of that ...”

“... in a fictionalised memoir called You Gotta Live, published in 1932. In this, Cravan appears as Rex Johns and Loy as Rita. Brown writes of Rex’s ‘striking figure’, his ‘smooth manners and grace of being’, his charisma for women (‘what Rex Johns had, he had for women’) and his hybrid exoticism: ‘Educated in ...”