“... Of the six plays which exist in forms such that authorial revision may be suspected, one – King Lear – is included in this edition in both variant forms. Hamlet might have been treated likewise but for considerations of space. The editors are here again acting on examined convictions, though admitting they may be wrong. And it is true that the plays ...”

“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 ...”

“... was cycled back into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to ...”

“... laureate and historiographer royal was vital to him, as was his income as a shareholder in the king’s theatre company. Money was tight after the Theatre Royal burned down in 1672, and again in 1689, when he was sacked from his official posts because he was a Catholic: translating Virgil appealed to him not only for artistic reasons but as a source of ...”

“... For​ close to half a century, Arthur Schlesinger Jr was perhaps the most recognisable liberal intellectual in America. With his tortoiseshell glasses, bow ties, and neatly stencilled hair, he played for the literary side of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids ...”

“... What could possibly be down there? Two new fish have risen to this bait. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending proceeds from their conviction that ‘Wagner’s libretto, ponderous and mannered though it may sometimes seem (and be), is charged with life and significance.’ They therefore propose ‘to probe its philosophical and ...”

“... page of this fine collection is without some comparable finesse of style, and the two translators, Richard and Lucia Cunningham, have worked hard for the marvellous combined effect of limpidity and obscurity which Maria Luisa Bombal creates. Crispin Kitto’s The Antarctica Cookbook is more of a confidence trick than a novel. But the reason why such a shoddy ...”

“... much ambiguity – she wanted to kill him, and not quickly.’ Miranda Seymour (no relation) and Richard Perceval Graves (the poet’s nephew) present Amy Graves in less hysterical terms, but agree that her rigid notions of purity helped inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying ...”

“... dominant image. For him, the present rot can be traced directly to the 1960s: specifically to Richard Neville’s Play Power, with its demonic slogan ‘the weapons of revolution are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as ...”

“... found the only extant item of his personal correspondence, a letter to him from his neighbour Richard Quiney; Malone who found what remains the only known copy of the 1594 first quarto of Venus and Adonis (and later bequeathed it, along with most of his remarkable library, to the Bodleian); Malone whose path-breaking edition of 1790, with its insistence ...”

“... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...”

“... in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its ...”

“... like Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist rooms. Some practices are still not an easy fit: an alcove of Conceptual and institution-critical work by Robert ...”

“... entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”