“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... by the warmth of Rousseau’s gratitude, and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all ...”

“... satire novel, tragicomic melodramatic epistolary lyrical); rhetoric (Homeric Pickwickian, music hall biblical, kinky political). He is credited by the OED with coining the term ‘poetism’, which suggests his misgivings about what poetry had the potential to become as well as his willingness to screw up his own aspirations to poetical effect. But screwing ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp ...”

“... when we came to read, in the shorter Nietzsche biography by Förster-Nietzsche, such comments by Richard Oehler [Elisabeth’s nephew] as ‘apparently not printed in the works’ or ‘apparently not published in the posthumous works’ regarding decisive quotations from Nietzsche cited in the text . . . What was still slumbering away in the manuscripts ...”

“... the new Trade Center complex, it will surely feature one of the world’s tallest buildings. City Hall has slashed social assistance programmes, closed fire stations, raised train and bus fares and introduced hefty property and income tax increases to eliminate a projected $5 or $6 billion budget deficit, but local leaders are still proposing to use public ...”

“... at Goldsmiths added to this sometimes rather austere cleverness the sparkle of his teacher Richard Wentworth’s playfulness (Hirst’s hairdryer and ping pong ball from 1994, called What Goes Up Must Come Down, has the punning neatness of Wentworth’s work). The English comedy of early Gilbert & George and a complicated mockery of class allegiance ...”

“... girlfriend by prosecuting a murder case in which the accused will hang. In The Story of the Night, Richard Garay has sex with a stranger to the sounds of revving cars from the police station opposite: Garay’s lover explains that the engines are providing power for a torturer’s cattle prods. Not even sex is a purely private transaction in Tóibín’s ...”

“... of the Chinese devil doctor Fu Manchu, the invention of an Edwardian hack-writer and music-hall lyricist who called himself Sax Rohmer. Fu Manchu has green eyes, a close-shaven skull, a long silken robe, an Arabian slave-girl and a performing marmoset; and he wages war on the West, pretty much for the hell of it, with the aid of a small army of ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”

“... waning. In some ways his case compares with those of John Clare, also confined at Northampton, and Richard Dadd, who both managed to be creative under lock and key. But architecture, a more businesslike pursuit than poetry or painting, raises obvious obstacles for the unpredictable, the notorious or the lunatic. The professional hero of these years was Temple ...”

“... Hilda Doolittle, who was Ezra Pound’s ‘dryad’ and who, when she married the writer Richard Aldington, had her profession of poet struck out on the wedding certificate. From 1916 to 1918 HD lived in the room that Sayers later occupied, and years later went into Freudian analysis to recall her terrible time there: after the death of their ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... off without anaesthetic. A few days later, he suffered another blow: the death of his infant son, Richard. Although the wound healed well, the recovery would have been gruelling. All the while, the invoices and orders kept piling up. At the time of his surgery, Wedgwood styled himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ Queen Charlotte and was on the way to becoming ...”