“... composition, but finishing a book made Cheyne physically sick. Late in his life, he told Samuel Richardson that ‘I never wrote a Book in my Life but that I had a Fit of Illness after.’ Neglect and bad reviews made his spirits ‘jumbled and turbid’, throwing him into a ‘vertiginous Paroxysm’ so dizzying that he was forced ‘to lay hold on the ...”

“... commentators have focused on Thatcher and Scargill when writing about Britain’s late coal age; Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation is more interested in the experience of the miners: working underground; feeding and clothing a household; and, most of all, organising the dispute and surviving a year without a salary while often encountering violence at ...”

“... Motherwell), Cage was well placed to soak up ideas. He played chess with Duchamp, and befriended Robert Rauschenberg, whose notorious White Paintings – a series of rectangular canvasses painted plain white – have often been seen as the visual counterpart to 4’33”. Cage recognised that the ‘emptiness’ of Rauschenberg’s paintings was no such ...”

“... conflict. (The character of Ryman, Foden notes in an afterword, draws on the real-life Lewis Fry Richardson, a relation by marriage of Foden’s father-in-law.) Meadows is supposed to wheedle information about the number out of Ryman; but, by his own account an ‘inward, unreflexive creature’, he is singularly unqualified for the job. Foden provides a ...”

“... her of robes and jewels, sob and swoon. ‘The great business of painting,’ declared Jonathon Richardson the elder, echoing almost all earlier European writers on art from Alberti onwards, ‘is to relate a history or fable’ – to compete with the poet or dramatist, and best of all with epic and tragedy. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche ...”

“... way of proving which man was telling the truth. Meanwhile, Kleindienst’s replacement, Elliot Richardson, insisted as a condition of taking office that a special prosecutor – at arm’s length from the Justice Department – be appointed to investigate Watergate. The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, set out to subpoena tapes of certain presidential ...”

“... expedition, though they were in different ships. The next of Taylor’s common seamen is William Richardson of Whitby, whose narrative, already familiar from Spencer Childers’s 1908 edition A Mariner of England, is printed here for the first time ‘unimproved’, from the original manuscript in the National Maritime Museum. ...”

“... but it was the German who became the world’s most influential ‘Darwinist’. (The historian Robert Richards has written that before the First World War more people learned of evolutionary theory through Haeckel’s publications than through any other source, even if Haeckel’s Darwinismus was a proprietary blend of the Origin’s natural ...”

“... makes them seem like Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, respectively. In The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Robert Darnton described a night in Paris in the late 1730s when two apprentice printers went on the hunt for cats and staged a mock-trial before hanging them, to the raucous delight of their apprentice colleagues: the episode, as Darnton tells it, was an ...”

“... that Alec Guinness’s arm had been jogged by his publisher. ‘We need more; tell us about Ralph Richardson.’ Guinness, caught off guard, contributes a tasteless account of this great friend and considerably better actor permanently in his cups. He has written a book in which we learn little about the author which we didn’t know already but a great deal ...”

“... Elaine​ Potter Richardson changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973. She was 24 years old and had decided that ‘Jamaica’ was more stylish. More important, a new name would allow her to publish without attracting the attention of her mother, Annie Drew – no matter that Annie was living in Antigua and Kincaid in New York ...”

“... libre ou mourir’, but that wouldn’t have rhymed with ‘holocauste fort’. Plenty of Hubert Robert (‘du plus pur Hubert Robert,’ as Jouve used to say). Found a Folio series edition of Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris in the tempting bookshop. When I first knew the Marais in the late Forties it was ...”

“... children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that. The sex of the ...”

“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”