“... biographical evidence asks to be read in terms of what another son of the Yorkshire working class, Richard Hoggart, wrote about ‘the scholarship boy’, who goes on to lead an ‘apparently normal life, but never without an underlying sense of some unease’. Butterfield worked ferociously hard all his life, driven by who knows what mixture of ambition, duty ...”

“... probably dates back to around 600 years aa; fabulous and implausible, it has been described by one scholar as Cecil B. De Mille’s Gospel of Alexander. Behind the frontmen of the Roman era lies a rich and various corpus of lost texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts ...”

“... people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.’ Of his friend the dotty scholar George Dyer: ‘With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new coat him in russia, and assign him to his place.’ In a marvellous vignette, Lamb makes a ‘sentiment’ – an ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... of formal policy-maker have come to the fore. There are the passive functionaries – men like Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East; he travels here and there but because he is a career Arabist his influence is nil. More ominous are the ideological over-achievers, typified by Richard Perle in ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... but also of opinion, of trying to read the characters of the dead. I am not a 19th-century scholar, a Brontë expert, a Brontë fan even. A year ago, I was not interested in Charlotte, or her mysterious sisters or feckless brother, or their eccentric father, and I was certainly not interested in her charming publisher or her upright critics. I was not ...”

“... of progressive education. Dai Smith, on the other hand, a man of parts and a wit as well as a scholar – he is the historian of Welsh rugby, and currently Head of English Language Programmes at BBC Wales – has assembled a feast of primary sources. There is the pocket diary of Harry Williams, Raymond’s father, starting in 1919, and also his First ...”

“... One example can stand for many. The US Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 by Richard Nixon, has been responsible – under both Democratic and Republican leadership – for a large share of the improvements we now take for granted in the restriction of toxic chemical release, fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first ...”

“... where he spends some of the loose change unconsumed by his infamous million-pound barbecue on a Richard Long print, A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind. ‘Technically, the photo was shit. The shitness added power.’ What attracted him was the bleak neutrality of the location – Central Iceland – and the title, which brought back the taste of Corby and the ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... accused him of everything from nihilism to ‘terrorist obscurantism’. (A notable exception was Richard Rorty, who understood that persuasion wasn’t Derrida’s purpose, and that he was an heir of system-destroyers such as Wittgenstein, who used ‘satires, parodies, aphorisms’ to subvert the efforts of mainstream philosophy to ‘ground’ its ...”

“... blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.After 7 October 2023, the Israeli government narrowed its ...”

“... which served to distinguish him from his companions (Elisabeth Becker of the Washington Post and Richard Dudman from the St Louis Post-Dispatch). As a Scottish nationalist, he wrote that he found DK’s wish to ‘make new things Cambodian’ quite sympathetic – yet far too crudely and chauvinistically anti-Vietnamese. This sentiment, Kiernan notes, was ...”

“... used his next vacancy to confirm the triumph of neo-conservatism. Robert Bork was a distinguished scholar at Yale Law School before becoming a neo-con hero by firing the Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox when other officials in the Justice Department refused to obey Richard Nixon’s order. He deliberately turned his ...”