“... Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like Little Richard.’ Poodle Play is the Cambridge Poetry Festival on steroids. The exoskeleton recalls the papers delivered from the platform on that Saturday afternoon in King’s: selections from the Frankfurt School, carried aloft like placards in a Brecht play, moral ...”

“... And they became even more reconciled to spending the nation’s money on war after 1714, when the weight of taxation began to shift markedly from land to commodities. To collect their taxes, Britain’s rulers, unlike many of their Continental counterparts, did not depend on private tax-farmers who creamed off for themselves as well as the ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... by the way you look up to them; and if you devote yourself to making this impression, it will give weight and seriousness to your life, lending it meaning in your own eyes and leading to your advancement.’ There is no written evidence to suggest that Jeffrey Archer has ever read Thomas Mann. One of the many striking aspects of his career, however, is the way ...”

“... some recent scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... angles’, we see people and events from his point of view. This means, not least, giving full weight to the interplay of politics and religion at a period when there was no meaningful way of separating them. Trinitarianism was as much a subject of division and debate at the dinner table as republicanism. To be a Dissenter was to have a political ...”

“... model for the first of the parables, ‘From the Republic of Conscience’, was an American poem, Richard Wilbur’s ‘Shame’. As for Harvard itself, his remarks about it are funny, fair and consistent with my memories of his teaching: in selecting the students for his classes, ‘what I wanted was evidence of their artistic doings’ rather than ‘the ...”

“... others have done, Kermode turned to apocalyptic in the attempt to counter-balance the overbearing weight of history. But in Eliot’s case, identification with tradition had itself been an attempt to escape from the apocalypse of The Waste Land. As Kermode noted in an essay written at the same time as The Sense of an Ending, the ‘imperialistic Eliot’ is ...”

“... hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional ...”

“... to Crete or Vienna, then jetting off to America on publicity tours or visiting Dublin to work with Richard Burton on the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In time, it ruined his marriage. Cornwell became passionately involved with the writer James Kennaway and his wife, Susan, a glamorous couple described by one friend as ‘Scott and Zelda, with ...”

“... By dint of following the Leninist model, small groups were able to punch far above their weight, while in the right historical circumstances, their structure afforded them enormous potential for expansion and, indeed, state-building. Even in unfavourable conditions, such as those that prevailed in Britain, their impact was out of proportion to their ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”