“... suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in 1968, which Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major ...”

“... last plays so attractive to scholars and literary critics ever since the invention of English literature as an academic discipline at the end of the 19th century, a development which contributed to the more general modernist bid to rescue Shakespeare from easy popularity. Even the mock-medieval Pericles – which if it weren’t for its depictions ...”

“... narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be edited before going out, scripts were no longer needed. ‘It was a great improvement,’ Plomley remarked. At last the series could be put ‘properly to work to fulfil its function of ...”

“... the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th century. But it is dramatically broken-backed. Its performing forces are massive; its timescale – it lasts roughly thirty ...”

“... voice’ proved a particular annoyance. Keynes, meanwhile, was the archetype of the haughty English lord; as White remarked to the British economist Lionel Robbins, ‘your Baron Keynes sure pees perfume.’ Squabbles aside, the two men ended up largely in agreement about the basic aims of the new international monetary system: to stabilise exchange ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white ...”

“... and whose formative influence he sought early on to minimise. Walsh admits his dependence on Richard Taruskin’s ‘monumental’ Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, whose painstaking researches into Stravinsky’s early life and his relations with the Rimsky-Korsakov circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring ...”

“... as a writing cyclist. First, for reasons that remained obscure, the interview was conducted in an English town where the car-centric ‘cycle network’ forced us to push our bikes through a maze of potholed lanes and ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs. Second, I woke up before Lance could reveal his secret strategy for winning the Tour de France a record sixth ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”

“... Wilkinson’s book, although only in passing).Muhammad Ali lifted the export ban, however, to let Richard Lepsius ship antiquities to Berlin. The head of a Prussian expedition that retraced the savants’ steps in the 1840s, Lepsius made his first visit to the pyramids on 15 October 1842, Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s birthday. On the pyramid of Khufu, his team ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”

“... with fast trains in the hope of giving life to a trans-Pennine megalopolis, a kind of northern English Rhine-Ruhr. The problem, for some, is that the short sweep of track carrying the new Chord over the River Irwell will cut off railway access to the world’s oldest station, the original Manchester terminus of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in ...”

“... are seldom of much help in correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a ...”

“... family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good fortune, Sutherland has coped very ...”