“... few pages before being overwhelmed by its complex cast of late Victorian characters, who – like Richard Jebb – have long since ceased to be household names, if indeed they ever were; and by what now comes across as its cloyingly sentimental perspective on the sun and strawberries of late Victorian privilege, unmitigated (as Raven observed) by much ...”

“... such as Komisarjevsky, Michel Saint-Denis (more fully treated by Croall), Peter Brook and Peter Hall. They are, of course, purely theatrical. Gielgud had an abnormally long theatrical life, appearing in or directing a great many plays in a great many places and also making dozens of movies, so his biographers have felt obliged to be long in their turn. They ...”

“... to cost those who offer it so little and benefit those who receive it so much. ‘Why, then,’ Richard Sennett asks, ‘should it be in short supply?’ Though Sennett frequently defines such scarcity as a lack of ‘mutual respect’ – as if none of us, no matter who we are, gets enough of it – a good many of his examples and much of his analysis ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John Wimber, a big, serious man with a neatly trimmed beard who specialised in what he called the ‘ministry of signs and wonders’. Wimber had been the founder of a Christian community called the Vineyard ...”

“... filled the area behind what is now St Peter’s Square with grand buildings such as the Free Trade Hall (now a hotel) and Manchester Central railway station (now a conference centre). Leigh’s set designers therefore built early 19th-century Manchester in an Elizabethan fort on the Thames. The post-production editor was busy on his laptop erasing the ...”

“... chocolates and Alka-Seltzer in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at ...”

“... all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard III, after a heavy pub-crawl with his co-star Wilfred Lawson, making such a hash of his opening soliloquy that a member of the audience called out. ‘You’re drunk!’– on which Barrymore approached the footlights and conspiratorially replied: ‘Just ...”

“... desire to restore it seems both heroic and quixotic: an act justified only by perfect faith.I read Richard Goy’s Venetian Vernacular Architecture – mainly about traditional housing in the lagoon but a wonderful introduction to Venetian building in general – and lying in my hotel room, looking up at the high ceiling, I knew that the ...”

“... is available on the ground. The most substantial of the completed buildings is the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. There are photographs of the exterior which make it possible to grasp the look of the whole, but while you are offered interior views of stairs and circulation spaces it is almost impossible to work out ...”

“... a tale of flight, family separation and reunion scattered across the waters and cities of what Richard Halpern called ‘the decaying Hellenistic world’. At its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but ...”

“... types of Englishmen and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois ...”

“... 1965].TP: I went to see Burroughs. The two dead people I got to show this book to: one was Richard Hamilton who died this week; the other was William Burroughs was died earlier on. William Burroughs was very generous in a terrifying kind of way. He said it’s okay, and why wasn’t it science fiction? I had a very tough day with him. Very ...”

“... to act quickly and radically to halt it. Almendros and men like him – Willis, Chapman, Wexler, Hall, Storaro, Rotunno – are the de la Tours, Vermeers, Daumiers, Wyeths, Hoppers of this art, and modern cinema production methods are making pavement artists of them, content to see their work washed away in the next shower of rain. Almendros is admirably ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”