“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... worked with Randolph S. on editing the C papers, here useful on C and social reform; the navalist Richard Ollard, who has written on the Churchill-impacted Admirals Fisher and Cunningham (and the Navy), John Grigg (and Lloyd George), etc. The platoon’s roll goes on, with Gordon A. Craig, America’s Germanist and ...”

“... Haldane was one of a trio of mathematically minded biologists – the other two were Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright – who brought Mendelian genetics and natural selection together in what became known as the Modern or neo-Darwinian Synthesis, a comprehensive theory of evolution which persisted throughout much of the rest of the 20th century. In the ...”

“... the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... Socialist Realism and the realism of contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, who celebrate ‘the total fetishisation of object relations’, but maintains a more ambiguous relationship with formalism in which he ‘attempts to imbue abstract painting with a mnemonic dimension, commemorating, if nothing else, at least its ...”

“... of a quarry worker, Ebenezer has modestly risen to the condition of self-employed ‘grower and fisher’. He never leaves the island, and what wisdom he gains is circumscribed in provinciality. Much happens around Guernsey between 1870 and 1960, but the island remains on the edge of history. The hero, too, has a quiet, marginal existence. His best friend ...”

“... the journey of many apprentice rulers in Shakespeare – Henry IV, Prince Hal becoming Henry V, Richard II in his fruitful desolation. But here the personal is inseparable from the public, and from the cosmic: in The Mahabharata, the Great Chain of Being has the limitless reverberations which Shakespeare fully attained only in his later tragedies and ...”

“... infantry officers of some eminence. In the page of mug-shots at the end of this book, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the Civil Service and nominally of the Treasury, too, for virtually the whole interwar period, looks wonderfully haughty and disdainful in his black topper. Sir Richard Hopkins, who headed the Treasury team for ...”

“... May, ‘an eclectic blend of ulysses, kilroy, icarus, neptune, ishmael, noah, jonah, columbus, and richard halliburton! So you must, in all kindness, emphasise your mortal finitude when next we meet!’ He had leave in June, and it is through Gordon’s faithful eyes that we see Plath on the cover of the first volume of the letters: blonde hair, red lipstick ...”

“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”