“... or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and other novelty acts, billed with ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... shyly-stated remarks hung together, but the overall effect was unmistakable. She was being very nice. If Alice will just pass that sick-bag of hers, we can decode these shyly-stated remarks more accurately. Max Hastings has or had a secretary who thinks that Garland’s cartoons are in tune with her preferred party: that is, they are expiring from ...”

“... But a thick, hot, sweet callaloo burnin’ you tongue Wid dem chunk o’ dumplin’ goin’ down nice an’ wid coconut wid o’ widdout deaders as de case may be as de taste may be as de pocket may be but sweet an’ hot Collins is not content to stay in an area some might condemn as ‘local colour’. She pushes ‘Callaloo’ towards a consideration of ...”

“... House’s attack dogs and spinmeisters called it ‘garbage’ and ‘sleaze’. Drudge (who has a nice turn of phrase) called it ‘unspin’. Clinton and his aides had been uneasily aware of the dangers posed by Drudge for some time. As the Starr report records, in mid-July 1997 Clinton told Lewinsky that ‘Sludge’ had turned up something on Kathleen ...”

“... Monthly for publishing the ‘unfounded’, ‘racist, sexist and anti-working-class theories of Richard Hernstein, William Shockley and Arthur Jensen’? That, Lakatos said, is the sort of talk used by the Church against Copernicanism: ‘unfounded theories’. And so on, with other targets less well able to look after themselves than Putnam. The editor has ...”

“... The insights of the first four chapters seem to be that lots of people do things that are not very nice, that it’s all a very difficult problem, and that, on the whole, it’s better to be sensible than silly in thinking about it (it’s more sensible, at least). It won’t spoil the story much if the reader starts at Chapter Six. Yet amid all the pious ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... One-Chord Wonders, which worthily organise and educate the chaotic punk threat until it sits up nice and neat as a Cultural Studies textbook. Jon Savage’s monumental tome, 15 years in the writing and in which the author’s parents and grandmother get thanked for ‘living through this with me – twice’, attempts to do all these things at ...”

“... whereof ... this sacrament is called the body and blood of Christ.”’ The quotations are from Richard Bonner’s 1547 treatise on the sacrament, and MacCulloch, in a persuasive piece of detective work, identifies this otherwise unknown author with Cranmer himself. From this challenge to the Roman Church’s view of the Eucharist everything else ...”

“... he has written a novel called The Memorial; lives with his mother and a younger brother called Richard; works on a movie; has fashionable but uncontroversial left-wing ideas (he speaks himself of his ‘parlour socialism’); confesses to small acts of cowardice. But we know far more about the quality of his attention to the world than we know about ...”

“... mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the names – or rather, the nicknames ...”

“... be a biographical dictionary of an array of fictional characters from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could ...”

“... Colebrook, was completely deaf. They were the inspiration, it might seem, for the movie starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder called See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which had the immortal tagline ‘Dave is deaf, and Wally is blind.’ ‘It may be regarded,’ Holman wrote in his account of the journey, ‘as a curious incident in our travelling connection ...”