“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... on Francesco Patrizi, though the chances of Shakespeare having even heard of him, let alone having read his unpublished treatise on la maraviglia, seem slender.) Their animus against the rational, though, often seems to have less to do with the Middle Ages than with the New Age. Biester, by contrast, adopts a brisk Madison Avenue manner towards the ...”

“... to your advancement.’ There is no written evidence to suggest that Jeffrey Archer has ever read Thomas Mann. One of the many striking aspects of his career, however, is the way in which Felix Krull’s larger view of the world has advanced it. Many older men (and at least one older woman) have been beguiled by his apparently artless energy and ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare ...”

“... accessories; she did not turn up at all to confer with the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage; she sent a secretary out to buy a ring matching one she had mislaid. Things came to a head in January, when an international conference was called in Tokyo to put together an aid package for Afghanistan at which more than three billion dollars ...”

“... writing, The Sense of an Ending is both extraordinarily lucid and strangely elusive. When I read it again recently, it often seemed like an extended response to a work to which it nowhere adverts – Eliot’s Four Quartets. This curious palimpsest was perhaps motivated by Kermode’s attempt to distance himself from Eliot while accepting the terms ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first of a three-volume study to be entitled Bolshevism and the British Left), which may also be read with profit by those interested in current debates about the funding of the Labour Party. In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the pre-existing ...”

“... He is perfectly aware that ‘more familiar Cold War sages’ – such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Richard Hofstadter or J.K. Galbraith, none of whom repudiated ‘the more progressivist optimism of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency’ – provided a ‘theoretical rendition of liberalism’ very different from that of the writers he describes as Cold War ...”

“... of books than most readers, and better even than that of many writers (and they have certainly read more than the average novelist, whose gaps are sometimes shocking). But memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us. As far as it is possible to generalise, I think we misremember small pictures as being larger than they are, and large ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character ...”

“... widespread influence: on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and David Fincher, and on the critics in whose work I was immersing myself, the so-called ‘Paulettes’ who populated the culture sections of American publications (notably David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek). But not only them. Kael had ...”

“... ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz. The movie takes place over a single day in Austin and follows a string of ...”