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“... Stimson took office as US Secretary of State in 1929 in the firm belief that ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,’ and closed down the State Department’s SIGINT (signals intelligence) agency. The success of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbour in 1941 reflected the Administration’s continuing inability to make good use of the SIGINT ...”

“... an elaborate cartouche that fills another. They are showy pieces of engraving: things to be read in quite a different way from the precise and comprehensive array of symbols (‘over 50 signs for human settlements, physical relief, military installations and so on’) that fill the topographic map that lies between them. The divisions of the exhibition ...”

“... is telling. In both in the engraving and Lewis’s portraits cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids read as sculpted volumes rather than soft, mobile flesh. You wouldn’t have got much help if you were trying to imagine what Shakespeare or Lewis might have looked like had they walked into the room. On the other hand, the engraving has only to appear on the ...”

“... and elegant. He hated the pages of black sans serif type, punctuated with illustrations, which Richard Hollis – working with Berger and others – had produced.Beatrice Warde, advocating the kind of tailored designs which Tschichold (briefly, but brilliantly) and Schmoller produced at Penguin, said that a book, like a wine glass, should not draw ...”

“... the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this sort, even if he fastidiously forgets ‘Hallelujah’ when he writes that in ‘For now is Christ risen’ Christ is ‘named for the first time in Messiah’. His quirky, learned, acerbic book ...”

“... procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started ...”

“... doesn’t tell us to), other, later figures who couldn’t walk in the air, and especially perhaps Richard Drew’s famous photograph, taken at 9.41 a.m. on 11 September 2001, showing a man dropping downwards head first, one leg bent at the knee, only the abstract vertical lines of a building behind him, a construction that in the photograph has neither top ...”

“... The first two sentences of Richard Ford’s seventh novel have the ring of permanence about them: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.’ They encapsulate not just Canada’s events, but its mood and style, the balance of sensational goings-on with a ruminative, rueful delivery ...”

“... and Ezra Pound, for example, at much 16th-century Italian art. In the Introduction to his book Richard Goldthwaite writes that it is an ‘enlargement of Jacob Burckhardt’s classic – and much-debated – vision of Renaissance Italy as the birthplace of the modern world’. But he takes no interest in the discovery of pagan antiquity, the natural world ...”

“... physical detail, and has all the pace and grip of the high-class modern thriller. Yet no one could read it as a thriller. It is heavy with a sense of doomed history that connects it with Dog Soldiers, for the leading figures have been involved in previous American adventures overseas, and describe themselves as Vietnam burn-outs. Most of the characters are ...”

“... learned, comes in volumes of thirty or forty pages and seldom fills up the page. It can be read, which does not mean to say that it may be absorbed, in the time it takes to polish off your apple and cheese. Prose, if it happens to be Dostoevskian epic with injections of Tolstoy, will keep you busy for a solid month and easily stop you getting on with ...”

“... Pazzi and Rucellai families of their position as clients of the Medici. Some contributors, like Richard Goldthwaite (on consumer demand) and Bill Kent (on ties of neighbourhood), write well about topics on which they have already written elsewhere. Others break new ground, notably Ronald Weissman on ‘Mediterranean Values and Renaissance Society’ and ...”

“... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the ...”

“... You can read about neo-Nazis all the time in the New York Times,’ said a sardonic acquaintance of mine the other day, ‘as long as they are in Germany.’ And indeed, the existence of an all-American underground composed of paranoid fascist mutants was until recently considered a fit topic only for those who are themselves labelled paranoid ...”

“... It is interesting that Richard Serra, who is not short of offers of highly promising locations for which to make site-specific sculptures, accepted the Tate’s invitation to do something in their domineering central hall – a space ostensibly built for showing sculpture but serving that purpose rather badly, partly because it makes the things put into it look as if they were lost at the bottom of a well, partly because its huge Ionic columns dwarf other forms in the same field of vision ...”