“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”

“... UDF was to blame for its violence against Inkatha, Inkatha were not goodies either. The work of Richard Cobb should have made us expect all revolutions to be shot through with villainy, banality and irony. For every saintly Mandela or heroic Steve Biko there were always likely to be several murderous Harry Gwalas, fraudulent Allan Boesaks and others who ...”

“... the people carried on by generations of time-serving buffers, unwitting agents of malign superior powers. Some subscribe to this conspiracy theory because they genuinely cannot see anything in Shakespeare and can find no other explanation for the fuss about him. Others like him better but feel they have to politicise him into conformity with their own ...”

“... a creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and like them it had almost magical powers. Antiquarians claimed they could speak to the dead; magi claimed they could call them back to life; and indexes genuinely showed the reader where to find exemplary figures doing great things, as well as what they had said and written on any given ...”

“... Lewes wrote, ‘one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or untested powers, are confidently announced as certain to carry everything before them, when they appear. Only they never do appear.’ Clough’s premature demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tempest sequel or commentary, The Sea and the Mirror, testify to a major poet at the height of his powers. A model of professional industry, he was also in these years writing a good deal of prose.Presumably he agreed to do this heavy lecture course for the same reason he wrote prose – because he needed the money – but they show few signs of being put ...”

“... in 1678 and became the first Englishman to make the journey to Mecca and return, long before Richard Burton’s celebrated voyage in 1853. Pitts converted to Islam, as so many in his situation did, and although he remained a slave until 1693, when he managed to escape, he seems to have been treated well and to have formed a largely favourable view of his ...”

“... yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify (Norman Foster, along with his former partner Richard Rogers, is English for Architecture). No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an ...”

“... second is about the clash, which began in India but ended in Egypt, between the two major imperial powers of the 18th century, Britain and France. In the period from the mid-18th century, when Jasanoff’s story begins, until 1858, when the Crown dissolved the East India Company to create the Indian Empire, the fledgling ‘British Empire’ in India was a ...”

“... Colebrook, was completely deaf. They were the inspiration, it might seem, for the movie starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder called See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which had the immortal tagline ‘Dave is deaf, and Wally is blind.’ ‘It may be regarded,’ Holman wrote in his account of the journey, ‘as a curious incident in our travelling connection ...”

“... the war as the ‘strongest nation in the air’, Britain now lagged far behind the other major powers. London, the Evening News maintained, was virtually defenceless. So began that year’s bombing panic. The paper’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, had begun to campaign for aerial rearmament. At the end of January, he announced the formation of a new ...”

“... attic. The collapse of the New Deal coalition opened another door as well. Through it walked Richard Nixon. Stein examines the strategy that aimed at making the Republicans the party of the white working class. It was an audacious political move that took advantage of the racial, nationalist, religious and patriarchal resentments and fears unleashed by ...”

“... lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of record’: Sir Richard Burton ‘had done exactly that again and again’. Merchant was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay before leaving for the US in 1958, and was clearly not so sceptical about colonialist claims of conducting a mission civilisatrice in the way that ...”

“... They are people we cannot help treating, at one level, as entities with wishes, fears, awareness, powers over us, subservience to us. We still desire their presence – their regard. And therefore we resent their failure to give it, or dream a reciprocity still lingering on. But corpses (for the hunter-gatherer mind in all of us, which goes into overdrive at ...”