“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ignored by philosophers ...”

“... his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show. The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ...”

“... of air power was to ‘attack the will of the enemy’s people’. ‘Whatever the civilian may desire or squeak for, to put it vulgarly, in the next great war he is going to be “in the soup”, and what kind of soup will it be? A pretty hot one!’ It could plausibly be argued that the readiness of British statesmen to allow the dismemberment of ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... a Soviet spy, and with her support, Kuczynski was recruited by Moscow and received a visit from Richard Sorge, a charismatic German described by Macintyre as ‘a strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary … a dissolute warrior-priest’.* The Hamburger home became a rendezvous, and domesticity a ...”

“... boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied and continued in ...”

“... off without anaesthetic. A few days later, he suffered another blow: the death of his infant son, Richard. Although the wound healed well, the recovery would have been gruelling. All the while, the invoices and orders kept piling up. At the time of his surgery, Wedgwood styled himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ Queen Charlotte and was on the way to becoming ...”

“... tribute to the BFI’s Flipside series in particular for resurrecting and restoring films such as Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969) and Don Levy’s Herostratus (1967).Oliver also mentions the work done by the Talking Pictures TV channel, with the caveat that ‘poor prints, interrupted by adverts for cruises and incontinence pads, is a less than ...”

“... refused access.Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did, dramatising postwar Berlin, Paris in the 1950s, New York and London in the 1960s and 1970s, Manchester in the ...”

“... Gallic crackerbarrel.But it would also be easy to take him at his word. That fairy over his cradle may have brought him a fast eye, but his family gave him the means to exploit it. His father, Henri, owned the eighth biggest fortune in France, and the family lived in a grand and mobile fashion: summer at Deauville and the Channel resorts; winter on the Côte ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... and the merits of patriarchy as a ruling principle, to take a central example, the reader may well come away feeling decidedly sympathetic to Paine’s no-nonsense prose, matched to Paine’s no-nonsense demand that he should be shown the much-vaunted British constitution before being asked to refer it to the French, and preferring Mary ...”

“... Cold War and only elevated from this state by the crisis in the Gulf where their infernal devices may receive their first exposure to reality outside the engineering shed and the faked test. Los Angeles needs a historian, a political scientist, a sociologist, a pamphleteer, with the synoptic power to teach us how to see and seize it whole at the moment of its ...”

“... and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however ...”