“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... Richard Branson​ is the mirror image of a Russian oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... lead us to suspect that Persephone was anorexic, and that once inside her the seeds took on the weight and quality of horror, likely to swell to a mountain of food, manufacturing fat, swaddling and muffling her in a female body. Soon, she went home to mum. These three books are concerned with this kind of female relationship to food, and with mothers, our ...”

“... and the imagination. According to Castoriadis, emancipation can be achieved by throwing off the ‘weight of the ontological inheritance’ with which not just received philosophy, but in a sense the whole of social reality, is encumbered. What Castoriadis has in mind, however, is not the process, familiar in the history of philosophy, of shedding one dodgy ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”

“... comparable stature to take his place. It was a time when factions developed and relatively light-weight figures could manipulate proceedings. Furthermore, Farington was beginning to be overtaken in his chosen career of topographer by younger and more brilliant men. Trained by the classical landscapist Richard Wilson, his ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... and so III speak to him like this Friend, you triumph do you not free from all of life’s weight – from the old sickness of living (oh! I feel you so strongly) and that you are certainly always with us, father, mother, – but free, eternal child, and everywhere at once – and the defeats – I can say this because I am keeping all my pain for us ...”

“... the base of Trajan’s column:Think how some excellent, lean torso hugs       The brink of weight and speed,Coasting the margins of those rival tugs       Down the thin path of friction,The athlete’s dancing vectors, the spirit’s need,       And muscle’s cleanly dictionThe heedless young provide the necessary contrast to the column’s ...”

“... both national and televisual – that made them possible. To accept (and extend to Celtic Britain) Richard Hoggart’s assertion, in The Way We Live Now, that the English are ‘most characteristic of their collective selves when being irreverent, vulgar, nutty rather than when brought together in deference or respect for occasions invented by their ...”

“... man. In the opening chapter of the book their chosen victim is Molly’s former husband, Richard, a vaguely plutocratic figure. They laugh at him: he, quite simply, fails to understand them. And who could? They both exist at the fag-end of a number of exhausted possibilities. They have both been members of the Communist Party. They have both ...”

“... level there is much in late Degas that cannot be explained by age and eyesight. On these matters Richard Kendall’s excellent catalogue of Degas beyond Impressionism is highly instructive, and informative and unintrusive in its judgments. It tests your instincts and answers questions without invading the space between you and the pictures. Some questions ...”

“... hand’. Close up, however, it’s evident that they contract their muscles and shift their weight to move ‘in the direction they wish to go’. Blam is curious about each of them, ‘infant, girl [and] greybeard’ alike, but he’s particularly interested in the women he sees. As he stares from the window of a tram one day, a glimpse of a woman ...”

“... achieved by removing the structure of the suit to create a soft, sloping fit, as modelled by Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) – a look much emulated in the City and on Wall Street. Fashion, Breward emphasises, is always provocative, endlessly recycling the aesthetic challenges of the fringe into mainstream culture. Paul Smith ...”