“... She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six years in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, liked one of them enough to buy several in 1972. With her first cheque for writing, she bought the children sausages and chips for dinner, like the ...”

“... who couldn’t speak the local languages, to train Afghan police and soldiers who couldn’t speak English. Young men were plucked from their villages, given a couple of weeks of training and then sent to man rural checkpoints. In the best-case scenario, they answered to the corrupt Ministry of the Interior in Kabul; often they ended up working with the ...”

“... Eighties. Chief among the leaders of this mission are the Cambridge classicists Simon Goldhill and Richard Hunter, who has written a book on Apollonius (The ‘Argonautica’ of Apollonius: Literary Studies, 1993) as well as producing a scholarly edition of Book Three and a translation of the whole thing (which is already, ominously, out of print). This ought ...”

“... notes and sketches for the Glass. He published a version of these in a box in 1934; it appeared in English in book form in 1960, thanks to the patient labours of Richard Hamilton, who also constructed a precise copy of the Large Glass, which Duchamp signed, for the Tate. The notes tell us, among other things, that the Bride ...”

“... synonymous with (among other liberations) sexual liberation, and he behaved like Hugh Heffner or Richard Neville. His playboy aspect means he is dismissed as a lightweight by those who claim to know what is serious in Russia; but he gave a pungent and rousing speech. ‘The trouble we have in becoming popular,’ he said at one point, ‘is that a lot of ...”

“... and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and includes s0me Russian and German. It’s a lesser work in every sense than Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which came out first though it deals with a later period. The Court of ...”

“... net cast by most postmodernist critics (myself included): Dennis Oppenheim rather than Richard Serra, say, Gretchen Bender rather than Cindy Sherman. Although written by a critic in formation, these early texts anticipate many of his later concerns, especially when it comes to artists focused on perception and technology, from Blake and Turner to ...”

“... the national calamity, in the final days of the war he had come to suspect that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig ...”

“... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the ...”

“... blame him for the enclosures, the flight from the land to the cities and the disappearance of the English peasantry. His son, Lord Townshend said, ran the farming side. Having inherited the title and the estate late in life, just before his 65th birthday, he was focused on the house, which a senior historian at ...”

“... terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The Observer published what it considered to be important and interesting, Lewis says, ‘without having to worry too much about ...”

“... that the voice of her two semi-autobiographical novels – Ma Mère rit (translated into English as My Mother Laughs) and Une famille à Bruxelles (translated as A Family in Brussels) – slips between that of the narrator and that of her mother, often in the same sentence, without a change in pronouns. The mother tongue was already present in one of ...”

“... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...”

“... have eclipsed it a bit now, but for a long time the elopement from Wimpole Street was the great English literary romance, and all the more remarkable for the way that so much of it happened in great swathes of impassioned text. After Browning was dead his son brought out an edition of the complete correspondence, to which his father, normally a person of ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”