“... the full Leon Edel-Matthew Bruccoli filing-cabinet treatment. For years Vidal has made fun of ‘scholar-squirrels’ – myopic trivia buffs who comb the lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald hoping to find the one itty-bitty piece of factual lint no one else has – and here comes Kaplan, gathering nuts in May. Passage after passage is devoted to travel and ...”

“... of its leadership is elected. ‘The Chinese do not understand the vote,’ a British investor, Richard Thornton, remarked that June. The Independent commented that one million marching in Hong Kong was even more significant than one million demonstrating in Beijing. David Owen warned that the involvement of the colony could be ‘very dangerous’. In ...”

“... whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, a Briton like Richard Hoggart, reared within a working-class milieu which seemed to be wall-to-wall. Hall was pitched between conceptual systems as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single doctrinal system, as heterodox in theory as he was hybrid in ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... before it, found that the problem had no solution. Even the most moderate Arabs, such as the scholar Albert Hourani, insisted on an independent Arab state, ‘with full rights for the Jewish citizens’, while the most eirenic Jews, such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, hoped for a binational state, ‘a common motherland for these two semitic ...”

“... many times, but the cautionary message of 1953 is still far from being absorbed. As early as 1964, Richard Cottam, a political officer in the US Embassy in the 1950s and later an Iran scholar, warned that the press and academic ‘distortions’ of the Mossadegh era bordered on the ‘grotesque, and until that era is seen in ...”

“... who inherited the Shakespearean gifts of his parents, at the age of 11 learning the whole of Richard II by heart in six weeks? Or with Vanessa, the best actor of them all, whom her father called ‘divinely mad’ with a conscience the ‘size of Grand Central Station’? Of these two books on the family Spoto’s is by far the more serious and ...”

“... Depression, convinced his future lay in music. In 1933 he sent a clarinet sonata to the pianist Richard Buhlig who, impressed by its maturity, sent it on to the composer Henry Cowell, then a major figure in the American avant-garde and an outspoken advocate of non-Western musical traditions. He liked the piece enough to include it in a concert programme and ...”

“... of canonical figures in the postwar pantheon of left-leaning ‘makers’ of the welfare state – Richard Titmuss, Michael Young and E.F. Schumacher – and argues that their international work in an era of rapid decolonisation led all three to look with a more critical eye on statism and ‘planning’. Gandhi was a major influence: his emphasis on community ...”

“... notion that she didn’t care for make-up. These were off-the-cuff opinions. In 2015, the film scholar Ginette Vincendeau made a trawl through pseudonymous readers’ letters to the French weekly Cinémonde in the 1950s. She found ‘Tangerine’ complaining that Bardot was ‘outrageously made-up’ (and mocking her ‘bleached hair’). Other ...”

“... the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had sought to come to terms with the new world of the Revolution – Fedin’s Cities and Years, Veresaev’s The Deadlock, Bulgakov’s ...”

“... to be written of the vast lurch into modernity of the criminal justice process. The American scholar John Langbein traces its narrative and procedural dimensions, basing himself extensively on the Old Bailey sessions papers, a rich and only recently mined resource, but also on less obvious sources such as the Post Office solicitors’ archives at Mount ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... the female protagonists of antiquity and such characters as Titus and Hamlet. It needed a feminist scholar to review the whole field for the map of influence to emerge. A second reason lies in what Pollard identifies as ‘a longstanding tradition of English exceptionalism’ that ‘has presented the British Isles as isolated from the Greek learning of ...”

“... poem says.’ ‘This is not to say,’ he adds, ‘that the same man may not be both historical scholar and critic,’ but such a man would be exercising two talents at discrete times rather than combining them in ways that respected the integrity of each. The conclusion (unhappy for many) is that the effects of one’s actions will always be confined to ...”