“... and she could be forceful even when she wasn’t spiking the drinks. Turning down an invitation to read, she wrote that her would-be hostess had ‘mistaken me for little Tich or Margaret Cooper at the piano’.The question of how she was to be received seems to have been linked, in Mew’s mind, with how she was to be remembered. In an early lyric she ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... but which seems to have taken the postwar baby boomers quite by surprise. It was there to be read about in classical and modern literature, in histories, in drama, poetry and the defeated mutterings of our own grandparents and parents. But our time was different, we thought, and we seem still to think, because even now we can’t work out what ...”

“... cruelty than with simple sex, an interest they appear to be superseding. Around the same time we read of allegations that the Greek police had been inflicting some form of bastinado on a British woman prisoner. They were said to use this means of persuasion as a matter of course. I suppose that we must remind ourselves of the fact that we live in an age of ...”

“... Joyce had built on the groundbass of Homer, so he chose the Aeneid, and called his hero Sergeant Richard Ennis, the name based on Virgil’s hero, the rank on that of J.B. Wilson. (Much later an American researcher pointed out to him that ‘R. Ennis’ was ‘sinner’ spelt backwards, and Burgess is willing to admit that novels may be ‘about’ matters ...”

“... of shorthand for much the film isn’t saying, perhaps can’t say. Roma was eloquently berated by Richard Brody in the New Yorker for not telling us enough about its time and place, and above all for not giving its heroine a voice, just submitting her to series of unexplained actions. Brody is right if we think Cuarón is trying to be De Sica or Rossellini ...”

“... as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s ...”

“... connected with an Edinburgh publication, the Mankind Quarterly. Lane is particularly useful on Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster, who is cited 24 times in the book, but whose research will strike many readers as questionable. The authors maintain that there is an accurate unitary measure of general intelligence, named g, first isolated ...”

“... cells, ant colonies, telephone systems, supermarket chains, television and religion. As his hero, Richard Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s ...”

“... novel, not a puzzle, and the reviewer need not be too shy of revealing the plot. The martyr, Richard Alderman, is a dull, decent father, an insurance man with two sons, a wife and a chic, youthful mother-in-law, more classy than himself. (I visualise them as something like the families in Rebel Without a Cause.) ...”

“... lack of interest in translations of her work. These have mostly been undertaken by her husband, Richard Philcox, with a sometimes heavy hand; she doesn’t read them.) Her novels of that decade – Tree of Life and The Last of the African Kings, for instance – range around the African diaspora. Her restlessness is a ...”

“... are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age demonstrates another, and less indirect, approach to the emotional texture of the past: the difficult excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people’s lives – one might call it the mood ...”

“... Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations ...”

“... associated with his ‘rules for writing’. Published as a slim book in 2007, they’re usually read in an abbreviated form excerpted in the Guardian. The rules don’t really tell you how to write a good book and have probably led to more than a few bad ones. They encourage a specific kind of minimalist approach (‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”