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“... their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be coming home. ‘How do you do, I cannot talk to you ...”

“... However​ dissentious, alienating, confusing and anxious life may have been for most of the English under the Tudors, the period, especially its last two decades, has usually been remembered as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion ...”

“... Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night:      My name is Headingley Hamer.      Absurd, I admit, but this statement is true, and it’s not that I don’t want to tell this story, nor that l feel impelled to do so and am trying to stop myself, just that I’m having trouble getting going ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... Archimedes’ first words were ‘Stand away from my diagram.’ Sir Richard Burton’s first word was ‘Chloroform.’ Chang’s first words were ‘I don’t want to go to bed.’ Alexandre Dumas’s first words were ‘I shall never know how it all comes out.’ Thomas Edison’s first words were ‘It is very beautiful over there ...”

“... Walking along the main street of Farnham one afternoon, Richard Hoggart was accosted by a drunk. He didn’t ask for money or spit ill-focused abuse. ‘I know who you are,’ he slurred, ‘and I’ve got one question for you. Who’s the better writer, you or Raymond Williams?’ Reading this, I found I was disappointed that the level of literary criticism among Farnham’s drunks was so low ...”

“... working groups and retained an academic consultant and a consultant on information technology – Richard Susskind, publication of whose own book coincides with that of the Report. Little more than two years from his appointment, and a year on from his interim report, Woolf has presented a comprehensive final Report, accompanied by a redraft of the rules for ...”

“... The greatest story since the Resurrection was how Mencken described the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. Among the three hundred-odd reporters present, besides Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune ...”

“... contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard Rayner, one of the most impressive of all the discussions, is also a study in contrasts, containing a highly unillusioned portrait of Amis’s public personality alongside an intelligent and generous appraisal of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were ...”

“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... its objective.’ This decision, if hardly to the War Council’s credit, is less bizarre than it may seem. The Council had been considering the bleak strategic options confronting it in other theatres, and was not told that Churchill’s naval advisers were ambivalent about the scheme. Dismayed by the heavy casualties that further action on the Western Front ...”