“... in the volume’s 502 pages. Londonists responded in two ways to Shepard’s stonewalling. Richard O’Connor – who aimed to write the definitive biography – was denied access to the materials in the Huntington Library. But the estate could not keep him away from the public record and O’Connor’s Jack London (1964) began with an exhaustive ...”

“... Opera became a sensitive field of ideological possibilities: the traditions associated with Richard Wagner, in particular, had to be reassessed in the withering light of Nazism, while in Italy the revival – begun under Mussolini as part of a nationalist cultural policy – of an apparently dead repertory of early 19th-century works led to a vogue for ...”

“... It is perhaps significant that when her daughter showed the manuscript of these memoirs to Richard Buckle, who was preparing the Penguin edition of his life of Nijinsky, he did not think it necessary to change his own evaluation. But he was fascinated by Nijinska’s memories of her brother’s hitherto unrecorded early childhood. One sees why: they ...”

“... to advantage’ in The Belle’s Stratagem, it seems that her acting and way with the words may have been less pleasing. There were some who attributed her subsequent lack of advancement in London to her Irish brogue. ‘Miss Smithson improves nightly,’ patronised Bell’s Weekly Messenger, ‘and is rapidly losing that drawl, which we presume she ...”

“... affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with Richard Brown on Tyneside in the late 1960s to see how rapid cultural change and class conflict were experienced by shipyard workers, before turning to Ray Pahl’s decade-long study of the Isle of Sheppey to gauge the impact of deindustrialisation, unemployment ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only ...”

“... its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.Neo-Malthusians ...”

“... press and an independent judiciary); by 1992, it was 35 per cent. He began his piece by quoting Richard Holbrooke on the previous year’s Bosnian elections: what if free and fair elections put in power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the rise of illiberalism in Eastern ...”

“... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... by conjunctions. The ‘lists’ are arranged with the most delicate prosodic care, as anyone may discover who will beat time through the sentence quoted above, counting syllables, noting the incidence of stresses, observing above all the rhythms of expansion and contraction in phrase length. There is an elegant command of the metres of prose; and swathed ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... religious reawakening, sold well and was made into a sentimental movie starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Backed by a reasonably lavish promotional campaign (‘In a CHANGING world, this motion picture is joyously dedicated to the heartwarming fact that BABIES still come in the same old, wonderfully old-fashioned way!’), the film was profitable and ...”

“... stood passive and bit his nails.’ But it was Nijinsky and Diaghilev who shared the new vision. Richard Buckle, Nijinsky’s biographer, describes what they were after: Fokine had rebelled against the academic dance, throwing out tutus, turn-out, and virtuosity for its own sake ... Diaghilev foresaw a dead-end to the ballet of local colour and the ...”