“... ghost stories are aware that they are being addressed by a man of much recondite learning, but it may not be apparent that the author is treating them to the recreations of one of the most learned men European scholarship has ever known. Even modern practitioners in one of James’s specialities will only be vaguely aware of his eminence in others, and an ...”

“... Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all. ‘No a man’s character isn’t his fate,’ Roth writes in Operation Shylock: ‘a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his ...”

“... explain the Earth’s structure and movement, and turned continental drift into plate tectonics. Richard Fortey witnessed some of the ferment first-hand while studying for a PhD in palaeontology at Cambridge, and in the 1980s, he used the distribution of trilobite fossils from half a billion years ago to work out the positions of some of the land masses ...”

“... of white racism was already on its way to becoming gospel. But Turnbull called it as he saw it; he may have been wrong, he was certainly subjective, judgmental and naive. His personal life (as we say) added to the myth of the handsome, charming hero. He was born in 1924, the child of a distant Scottish father and an eccentric Irish mother, who, despite being ...”

“... to the joy of seeing the teacher in the grocery store, with no more authority than anyone else. Richard Price wrote the scene for his novel Clockers, and reused it in an episode of the television show The Wire. It’s fine as written, but better on TV, with everything expressed by the quiet way one of the dealers asks, ‘Y’all go to the movies?’ and ...”

“... The other, less flattering image comes from the gathering in the Queen’s Gallery to hear Richard von Weisaecker make an address. The President of West Germany, speaking a crystalline, virtually unaccented English, spoke for about half an hour with restraint, wisdom and the quiet earnest of a man gravely engaged upon serious things. He had been ...”

“... affairs; it was a massive misjudgment in his own area of expertise that brought him down. Although Richard Lamb says that ‘Eden’s premiership foundered solely because of the Suez affair’ (which begs the question, much discussed at the time in the press, of whether it would not otherwise have soon foundered on something else), his book deals with the ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a ‘promising’ collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished ...”

“... the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he ...”

“... when you begin to look at them properly that they seem stranded, shipwrecked by history. ‘Age may not weary them,’ Geoff Dyer has written of the army of bronze soldiers on permanent guard at First World War memorials, ‘but … powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a ...”

“... emerges clearly from Michael Kurtz’s biography which appears in an excellent translation by Richard Toop. Kurtz records meticulously the genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not be as aware of this in the UK now as we were twenty years ago. But he still ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... shaped by the scholarly collectors among its trustees. Of those, perhaps the most significant was Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), who not only played a role in the museum’s acquisition of Charles Townley’s collection of sculpture and antiquities, but also bequeathed his own collection of Greek coins, ancient bronzes, gems, vases and Old Master and ...”

“... as the only man who sees. Hence his apparent meekness towards the artist, the hungry artist, we may add, which was noted by Brian Sewell when he and Peter went to David Hockney’s studio. His behaviour and utterance were always colourful, and artists warmed to him, as did taxi-drivers, policemen and women. He once said to me: ‘Patrick, you’ve got a ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”