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“... also have resulted in the discovery of things to write about Richard Burton. One of Mr Ferris’s major problems, apart from having to work out the always-tricky equation between reputation and rent-money, was that people didn’t really want to talk to him about Richard Burton. This wasn’t just because Richard Burton is so numbingly boring that anything ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... 1805 Prelude. Johnston believes, as David Bromwich often seems to in his study of Wordsworth’s major early poems, that ‘much of his poetry is even more autobiographical than we realise.’ Wordsworth’s poems, he claims, find hauntingly metaphorical expressions for ‘the facts of his life’, thereby concealing them. The thoughts about Wordsworth that ...”

“... not very democratic, to approve of the reforms which Cobbett set in motion. ‘Most of the major remedial legislation,’ says George Spater, ‘urged by Cobbett and opposed by the ministers of the day, except his proposals relating to the debt, were eventually enacted into law by parliament.’ He offers a list: Cobbett’s proposals about factory ...”

“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed. It is astonishing how many major players from Bush World are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom ...”

“... more distinguished magazines left standing ($2400 to Scrutiny in 1949, and a whopping $22,500 to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review over the course of five years, from 1947 to 1952). Literary prestige was, on occasion, converted into capital, as in the case of Cid Corman’s Origin, an important venue for Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of ...”

“... Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements over how ...”

“... of Apollo. It hosted – along with Olympia, Nemea and the Isthmus – one of Greece’s four major athletic festivals. Diplomats found it, like modern Switzerland, a useful place to exchange political information and conduct secret negotiations. Its wealthy religious dedications and treasuries, made by leaders from all over the Mediterranean world, from ...”

“... of such nationalists: but it is the occasional gringo heretic – like the muckraking journalist John Kenneth Turner who, in 1909, blew the whistle on Mexican neo-slavery, alleging that his compatriots had ‘transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the US’ – who has often made the biggest impact. Such auto-critiques carry special weight; they exude ...”

“... induce an awareness of the Cup’s potency as simple narrative.) It is hard to think of any other major sports competition that would have been ‘covered’ in this way – could it be that Someone did not expect England to get beyond the first phase of the competition and therefore saw no point in ‘weighing up’ the opposition? Certainly, there has been ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... of avant-garde writing and later teamed up with Girodias’s Olympia Press. Girodias is one of the major characters in Campbell’s story, and the major character of John de St Jorre’s preposterously indulgent narrative of what he calls ‘the erotic voyage of the Olympia ...”

“... question and her grace is hardly compatible with so low and ludicrous a subject. In Only Connect John Shearman also objects to this theory, not for prudish reasons but on technical grounds: Velásquez ‘has not given us the geometrical information that would allow such a calculation to be made’. However, Shearman feels that he does have enough information ...”

“... retrospective was commissioned by BBC Radio, and the interviews it prints with many of the major participants on both sides contain much material that could not be broadcast, the first import of which is to recall how often the Falklands did intrude into the corridors of power. We are reminded that, within the sweaty confines of the Foreign Office and ...”