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“... for lunch on the first assize day and placed his decomposing wig on the stand in the entrance hall. Lady Adrian came upon it and threw it in the bin. One of the county high sheriffs’ remaining functions, now that they’ve stopped collecting debts, is to make visiting judges welcome. ‘Well, at least you don’t have the high sheriff and his entourage ...”

“... The book includes Hecht’s most frequently anthologised poem, ‘The Dover Bitch’, a music-hall turn on Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. There were also poems that held private, darker meanings, especially ‘More Light! More Light!’, about a savage incident at Buchenwald. The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize.Hecht indulged in such dark ...”

“... was giving an award to Republican Senator Amo Houghton for being a good egg. I spoke to Richard Kind, who plays the press secretary in the sitcom Spin City, and his chum Tim Blake Nelson, who was very funny in O Brother, where art thou? ‘It’s a fair trade issue,’ said Richard Kind. ‘Canada is constantly ...”

“... Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie ...”

“... Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... seen by a mouse from its corner, and in 1898, going to Gladstone’s lying in state in Westminster Hall, he observes the ‘plain oak coffin’ and records an overheard remark: ‘Two carpenters in front of me said “a rough job – ¾ panels, & l½ framing”.’ It is hard to think of any other writer who would have foregrounded the workmen in quite that ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... painters, Velázquez was the only one who, to be fully appreciated, had to be seen in Spain. Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, had made the same point two years earlier. He conceded that Murillo was more successful ‘in delineations of female beauty, the ideal, and holy subjects’, but Velázquez’s ‘representation of ...”

“... emotion,’ there are still some places where we think weeping out of place. In 2006, Judge Julian Hall, a nice man whom I happened to be at school with, was ridiculed for breaking down in tears after hearing a mother’s tribute to her daughter who’d been killed by a reckless driver. He was further pilloried for the supposedly lenient sentences he passed on ...”

“... bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a ...”

“... at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if ...”

“... making’ of Sir Arthur Bryant’s three-volume life – that is, a sort of apprentice Pepys only. Richard Ollard’s Pepys (1974) is less strangely proportioned from this point of view, but again there is a deliberate attempt to set the familiar Pepys in a context of broader aspiration and achievement. Much of the new Companion volume rehearses the findings ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”