“... Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he notionally worked for, Kissinger helped the Nixon campaign in its secret effort to ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus a bit of romance) is a helter-skelter mess. Wheatley liked to talk about his ‘snakes and ladders’ technique: in effect, a ...”

“... years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the jurist Richard Falk, September 11 saw a terrible departure from the norm that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, so it was said, the right to make war – the jus ad bellum – came under strict legal control: World War Two ended with the ...”

“... or Jerusalem, was often prescribed to those hoping to be rid of leprosy, cataract or epilepsy. Richard Esty’s medical manual of 1454 includes a long pilgrim’s travel guide advising on overnight stops, exchange rates and potential routes between England and Jerusalem. Long journeys in unfamiliar circumstances, away from domestic and economic ...”

“... as Tonnard’s website states, it’s ‘a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible’. Some may scoff, but it turned out to be a shrewd investment, since it is now sold out, and used copies are changing hands on eBay for larger sums. There is also an accompanying set of postcards, ‘Highlights in the History of The Invisible ...”

“... The sooner goods could be sold or swapped or spirited to a friend, the harder they were to trace. Richard Rich, a mariner twice hauled before the Golden Grape inquiry, eventually remembered a great many pieces of eight he had ‘forgotten to express’, having given them ‘to Mary Paine, a young woman living in Melcombe Regis, to keep for him’.Salvagers ...”

“... of ten essays originally published between 1975 and 1989 and a Prologue, itself alone worth the price of the volume, which dilates on the current state of affairs in literary criticism and theory. The essays span the period marked by the composition of such books as The Classic (1975), The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), The Art of Telling (1983), Forms of ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... that a poet must be either in the canon or not in it – poets such as John Clare, Thomas Hood, Richard Corbett, Henry Carey, and pre-eminently Christina Rossetti. Paulin has some inspired choices from her, alive to her inspiration in such very different poems as ‘I caught a little ladybird’ and ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’. This ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... reached the Brothers’ chapel. Documents from a few years later speak to Leonardo haggling over price. His stock had risen in the 1480s, the painting seems to have been seen from the start as something unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better ...”