“... just about to emigrate, gave her a Bible, and ‘all the revelations I had either guessed or read about elsewhere fell into place.’ At the same time, he lent her books of which she had never heard. I was buried under an avalanche ... Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’, Tsvetayeva’s poems, and a blue-bound volume of Mandelstam, published in a tiny print-run ...”

“... I recently attended a lavish production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Directed by Boleslav Barlog, sung by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping with Beardsley’s erotic drawings, by Jürgen Rose, it was a feast for eye and ear. And yet as I crossed the road to the Cafè Sacher afterwards I wondered how successful the performance had really been ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon ...”

“... of glibness. His characters can be miniaturised by the economy with which he defines them. Some of Richard Stern’s stories are likewise impaired by fastidiousness. Trimmed, sandpapered, polished, they communicate first and foremost, paradoxically, the unobtrusiveness of the author’s skill. But there is an agreeable magnanimity and humour here. Stern ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... him keep appearing: literary and philosophical essays by Jean-Claude Milner (2003), Jean-Pierre Richard (2006) and Eric Marty (2006), a gossipy biography of his last years by Hervé Algalarrondo (2006), a chapter about his piano-playing by François Noudelmann (2008). And now we have two new/old texts by Barthes himself, transcriptions of his notes on the ...”

“... of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy ...”

“... three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative fragmentation, moving rapidly back and ...”

“... of the DNB in its early years had a particular predilection for biographers, but they did not read the signs of the times so well as to believe that the careers of women, perhaps especially of feminists, would be of interest to future generations. Mary Hays was excluded, along with her feminist contemporaries, Mary Ann Radcliffe, author of the polemical ...”

“... reckon, started with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic turn’. So it started with Frege or Russell, or early Wittgenstein, or the Vienna Circle; take your pick. Modern philosophy was mostly about epistemology: it wanted to understand what makes knowledge ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... level there is much in late Degas that cannot be explained by age and eyesight. On these matters Richard Kendall’s excellent catalogue of Degas beyond Impressionism is highly instructive, and informative and unintrusive in its judgments. It tests your instincts and answers questions without invading the space between you and the pictures. Some questions ...”

“... by the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to debates about the relationship between form and meaning. That relationship is the focus of Anthea Callen’s study of the ...”

“... him in Berlin and admitted that he was very much a product of that culture. He cited lyrics from a Richard Tauber song from Lehár’s Land of Smiles that had remained with him all these years – ‘Always smiling and always cheerful’ – and implied that this was part of his own persona too. His new book is much like that. The darker side of Modernism is ...”

“... socialists, and another about the Spanish Civil War that some reviewers praised but nobody read. Six hundred of the 1500 print-run for Homage to Catalonia were unsold when Orwell died in January 1950. Later fame has blurred the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this ...”