“... of bunkum. Even he cannot resist long accounts of EFTA ministerial meetings, but these are a small price to pay for his splendidly unedifying inability to think well of his opponents and his robust capacity to pursue old rivalries beyond the grave. I never found I could harbour much sympathy with those who were deeply opposed to my convictions on fundamental ...”

“... Both the books under review, different as they are in subject-matter, scale, format, ambition and price, have this tradition in common. Both are labours of love in English fields well-trodden by Englishmen. Both books, though copiously illustrated, deserve a place on shelves as well as coffee-tables: they have something to say, as well as something to ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... with the publication of what was advertised as a four-volume ‘complete’ edition in 1938. Richard Church, an editor at Dent, wrote a strongly worded letter to Richardson arguing that a concluded Pilgrimage was absolutely necessary to, indeed was her last chance for, ‘the secure establishment of ... fame’. Richardson, wanting to keep her books in ...”

“... has remained steadily loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like ...”

“... been a cheap thing to produce. Paper was the last stuff in Britain to come off rationing, and the price doubled. But although the circulation has gone steadily down, and the sport, or the audience for it, has grown a little remote with the years, the traditions of the sport (as well as the traditions behind it) still mean a lot to the Osmans. Colin wrote a ...”

“... is how Lévy became known as BHL after the hyping of the Nouveaux philosophes). Such is the price to be paid for leading the life of an intellectual in contempt of History, as if we were still living in the age of Sartre – the world may be subject to change, but not l’intellectuel. That these books should appeal to audiences outside France is hardly ...”

“... once acted as an extra in Ivan the Terrible and can cite all the mordant Brechtian lines about the price exacted by the cause. A note of genuine cosmopolitan disdain for the apparatchiks pervades the book. Ulbricht was not only (Wolf’s adjectives) hard-line, ruthless, authoritarian, pig-headed and heavy-handed; he also spoke – for heaven’s sake – with ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... Tom, so ready to lighten your load and share your pain – who gave us fair warning about the price to be paid for messing with popularity. ‘We persist,’ he wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable ...”

“... still crazy; Why make vows and try to praise me? Master,’ said this peasant lassie, ‘At your price I feel no urging To sell my state as a virgin For the whore that folks would call me.’ (Snodgrass) Jaufre Rudel, more idealistic, sang the praise of amor de lonh or ‘love from afar’, an eroticism tinged with religious yearning, while the earthier ...”

“... rationalist world. Perhaps the artwork was the one thing left that had a value rather than a price, and didn’t exist for the sake of something else. Like God, poems and symphonies existed just for the hell of it. As the idea of God was gradually ousted, art was on hand to fill his shoes. Like him, it was a repository of absolute value. Like ...”

“... of Klimt and Schiele to a position near Picasso in the Temple of Fame, or at least in the Art Price Index. De Pury once belonged to a partnership that did much to supply Ronald Lauder, who founded the Neue Galerie in New York and helped revise our understanding of the artistic importance of Vienna a hundred-odd years ago, yet his book contains next to ...”

“... for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed Turner that the price was now £11. Turner kept his diary for 11 years from his mid-twenties, while he was the mercer – keeper of the general store – of the Sussex village of East Hoathly. His parents were shopkeepers in nearby Framfield, and the only two of Thomas’s sons ...”

“... From then on I was just in the art world. Artists in New York – Barbara Kruger, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, David Salle – had begun to purloin images; and here, too, Acker found parallels for her own techniques of appropriation. On the Lower East Side others began to cross-hatch avant-gardism with porn, pulp and schlock, the lower reaches of popular ...”