“... to an absent fraternity of villains: ‘And from the six-foot rope, I fear/My neck will know the weight of my rear.’ The other two may also have been written at this time, but if so, after news of the pardon. One is addressed to Etienne Garnier, the clerk of the Châtelet prison, who, as Sargent-Bauer says, seems to have advised Villon against an ...”

“... from whom a degree of advocacy is appropriate. ‘In Solitude, for Company’, together with Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography of the poet, provides further confirmation that Audens are a definite buy. The wavering flame of academic attention has been nursed through the dangerous, immediately posthumous years, and is now – with some help from ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... over a period of only three months, and will doubtless be found wanting. Some paragraphs give weight to greater political decentralisation, with more accountability at a local level, but the general drift is towards a more presidentialist system. By allowing the President to serve a second, consecutive term, it also seems likely to entrench Chávez in ...”

“... case.’ Except that a horrible basket case is exactly what Royal Mail has become, according to Richard Hooper, whose successive reports on the organisation – the first appeared in 2008 – have given the government its case for selling the company off. The legislation to enable the sale is going through Parliament now. ‘Without serious ...”

“... before, when they were both eleven, and who now ran a tea plantation in Java, proposed by letter. Richard Turpin, on the other hand, had the advantage of being present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by ...”

“... evokes that novelist is the limpidity, the lightness of texture which yet supports a sufficient weight of meaning. The scene is Simla in the year 1871 – there is never any mystery about the dating of Farrell’s stories – and the characters are consequently British in the main. The British not exactly in India, but in a famous Indian hill-station, where ...”

“... a child, who, unlike almost all earlier representations of the infant Christ, appears to have a weight appropriate to his volume. The backside of a peasant at prayer in front of them and the dirty soles of his bare feet are very prominent (far more so when you stand beneath the painting than when you look at a reproduction). The St Matthew was rejected by ...”

“... history and other versions could be written. But the authors have given their version considerable weight. They acknowledge the help of a large number of people (usually from one variety of the Left or other), including some who sat on the National Executive of the Labour Party (NEC) and they have had access to Tony Benn’s huge personal archive. They are ...”

“... by the 19th century had turned into an exotic northern Arcadia for intrepid British travellers. Richard Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Alec Tweedie and Sabine Baring-Gould all trooped to the land of pumice and geysers. Most were ravished by the spectacle but all eventually had to come to terms with Iceland as a real country, struggling and ...”

“... away in the US, in his first year of teaching at Yale (his students the following year included Richard and Su Rogers and Norman Foster), and there were no faxes or e-mails to facilitate long-distance exchanges. Yet the scintillating design, finalised late in 1960, was, according to the client, Edward Parkes, very much a joint effort. However, when Parkes ...”

“... nuclear warheads. In principle, therefore, the whole nuclear arsenal could fit into one submarine. Richard Garwin, the designer of the first H-bomb, giving evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Defence in 2007, argued that a much smaller class of submarine, carrying missiles with a single warhead, would be more appropriate for the UK’s needs. There are ...”

“... dealers are always being asked to justify their macabre trade; that is one way of doing it. Richard Gatling’s way was more ingenious: with one gun now doing the killing work of 100 riflemen, he argued, the other 99 could go home, and live in peace. (There must be a flaw there somewhere.) And then there was the argument that you get with every ...”

“... the ethnographic profession: it is merely a form of servitude, it burdens effective work with the weight of weeks or months lost in travelling; idle hours in which informants disappear; hunger, fatigue, sometimes illness; and always those thousand duties which consume the days in pure loss and reduce the dangerous life in the virgin forest to an imitation of ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”