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“... of the Larkin oeuvre by way of his Sapphic schoolgirl jottings and taste for mannish women. For Richard Bradford, however, it’s still 1993. ‘Left-leaning commentators’, in league with ‘academics and other members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for ...”

“... both an astute moral purchase and a great sympathy for Highsmith. I wish I could say the same of Richard Bradford’s new Life, Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires. As the ill-advised title might suggest, the book is a sad mess: shallow, mistake-ridden, voyeuristic in tone. It’s hard to get through for a number of reasons. Tellingly, there are no ...”

“... a tonic, then, to pick up Art, Science and Human Progress, a volume of lectures sponsored by the Richard Bradford Trust, which was founded in 1969 ‘to explore the relationships between the methods of scientific investigation and of artistic creation in literature, the visual arts, and other art forms’. The Popperian process of conjecture and ...”

“... Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to rough up the bourgeois middle. What can one ...”

“... Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night:      My name is Headingley Hamer.      Absurd, I admit, but this statement is true, and it’s not that I don’t want to tell this story, nor that l feel impelled to do so and am trying to stop myself, just that I’m having trouble getting going ...”

“... the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much ...”

“... most harrowing account of such an exile in his story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. But many others, Richard Rhodes James for example, have recorded their experiences as ‘orphans of the Raj, paying the price of empire by a separation from parents’. Parents, too, of course had to pay the price, especially mothers, who were forced to choose between living for ...”

“... take on the central roles, cocks and all. It is to open first in a warehouse at Saltaire, near Bradford, and Tony had to meet the local press to tell them something about the play, the issues it discusses and how it relates to subsequent cultural history. The papers came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for ...”

“... the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane, would be much exercised by the discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s ...”

“... listed in Who’s Who, and that he managed to get money from the likes of Robert Maxwell, Cliff Richard and Twiggy. Since 1958 Butler had been the co-ordinator of a perennially impoverished study which began by examining the medical, social and economic circumstances of 17,000 babies born in the same week in March 1958, then over subsequent decades ...”

“... includes twice as many as were printed, many only in summary, in the earlier edition by the late Bradford Booth. Many of the newly printed ones are substantial and, in their various fields of interest, important. There is much official correspondence on postal matters – it is gratifying to note the several occasions on which the man who made a career out ...”

“... In this semi-rural conurbation, you can head out of town in any direction and hit a city: Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Huddersfield. There was no call to hang out in Dewsbury. It was a dump, we thought, and it got worse when the mills started closing, and unemployment started rising. My stepfather’s mill survived, buoyed by its luxury cloths that were ...”

“... between 1990 and 2009 found that 90.5 per cent of them were Deobandis. The would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid had Deobandi connections, as did the 2006 transatlantic airline bomb plotters and two of the 7/7 attackers. As Deobandis sometimes rather wearily point out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”