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“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... her grave in the Jewish cemetery at Père Lachaise thirty years after her death, not only was the stone covered with scribbled names but fans were still dropping their visiting cards through the grating. Another literary admirer, Matthew Arnold, mourned her as a symbol of the conflicting forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. ‘Greek-soul’d’ and ‘Trick’d ...”

“... specification of the relationship between public expenditure and unemployment became the corner-stone of the Treasury’s argument that public works meant inflation.’ It might be true that Hawtry was wheeled in to give a plausible economic rationale for this view, but this surely is to overrate its significance. The notion that the state might ameliorate ...”

“... captive audience to give her views on ‘Zionist thugs’.) In recent years, Richard Gere’s moist tribute to the Dalai Lama has been more the sort of thing. That, plus a lot of red ribbons in solidarity with Aids victims. This year, the red ribbons were down a bit and the preferred cause was Public Broadcasting, which the Gingrich ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... sweeping along any number of clichés, truisms and allusions in its wake, as when describing Richard Burton in Rich (1988): ‘He was driven by a devil that he never knew but he never stopped fighting, a maker of his own myths, Celtic, Faustian, an Icarus and a Don Juan, coming out from his beloved Wales like a mystical warrior to rove the world for ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... ballad-mongers and historians combined to give him his unsupported date in the time of King Richard’s exile, his wholly bogus aristocratic status as a dispossessed heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, and, somewhat incongruously, a greatly enlarged corpus of unashamedly plebeian opponents with an ever-increasing tendency to improve on the potter’s ...”

“... the city, wheeling her around to focus on unexpected views and details: ‘the texture of old stone, a batch of secondhand bathtubs for sale on a sidewalk, the juxtaposition of several buildings’. Though often thought of as a social critic (because of his collaboration with James Agee in 1941 on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Evans, too, distrusted ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... small birds who pick meat from a crocodile’s teeth. He has chased Ackroyd, dogged him, as the stone-throwing ‘Deputy’ worries Stony Durdles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Across the badlands of literary biography, from Eliot to Dickens. A parodic and jeering sidebar to Ackroyd’s monumental heritage project. ‘Tombatism’, Durdles’s coinage, part ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”

“... however, it may well be the result of a consciously chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ...”

“... of us might have done what he did, but your father had that ball-player’s arm.’ Francis’s stone ‘flew out of his fist like a bullet and caught the scab driver on the head ... The cops didn’t care about catching your father, of course. They were all with the strikers. But the Traction Company bosses forced them into a manhunt, and so we all knew ...”