“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... detailed links with Shakespeare’s plays, but I believe it is necessary to set two passages from Richard II and Henry IV Part I next to this sonnet – which, as Vendler says, is the first to remark on ‘a true flaw’ in the friend. In Act III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... of overlapping agencies, each competing for Presidential attention, and believing, in the words of Richard Helms (DCI 1966-73), that it had ‘to have a publication that arrives in the White House every morning’. Because of presidents’ short attention spans and crowded time-tables, the ‘publications’ have increasingly resembled tabloid newspapers ...”

“... stone to stone?’ The joke allows his key word for once to fit its commonplace denotation: inert weight, dumb, opaque resistance to human energies. In fact, it is against this obvious definition of stone that Stokes is concentrating his rhetorical efforts in these two books. That is why he invests so much energy in their erudition and into the wound up ...”

“... end well.By the time​ her first books appeared, Comyns was married to her second husband, Richard Comyns Carr, from whom she adopted her pen name. She met him through Lee and Brinton, and the three remained enmeshed in their torturous triangle. After Caroline’s birth Comyns had become increasingly desperate for Lee to acknowledge the child and leave ...”

“... most splendid case of this in Shakespeare’s early drama is of course the king known as Richard Crookback. The chronology of the early writing being as vexed as it is, it’s hard to say whether Richard III precedes The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But the character has all the compelling, attention-focusing quality I ...”

“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the official ...”

“... was something at the back of my mind, not quite hidden from myself and my schoolfellows – a weight, a darkness – which was against intimacy.’ What Thomas couldn’t quite hide was that he couldn’t quite reveal himself. This ‘dark’ something, he wrote, ‘had taken away all [his] irresponsibility’. Inhibition was the thing that kept him ...”

“... golden fount of his honeyed tongue.’ Godfrey of St Victor, too, wrote a poem about his teacher, Richard, describing himself lying on the ground and clinging to his master’s feet: ‘Such teachings resound from his mouth!/They ravish me – or rather restore me to myself.’ It’s a remarkable reaction to instruction – especially since, as Newman points ...”

“... and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being focused and ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... emancipation with the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Finally, he launched America’s full weight into the Vietnam War – and was crucified for it. Yet Caro also seems to delight in providing mounds of essentially irrelevant detail. For example, at one point Johnson’s backers in the oil and power industries very much wanted to get rid of Leland ...”

“... Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money). The book’s value was due not only to its extreme scarcity but to its central role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth ...”