“... Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... reconstructed iguanodon, the head of both the table and the beast was held – as of right – by Richard Owen, universally acknowledged as Britain’s premier anatomist, ‘the English Cuvier’, and arguably the foremost British ‘man of science’ of his generation. It is true that he was not, even then, entirely without detractors. Gideon Mantell, his ...”

“... perpetually present – and never more so than in this almost incredibly vivid biography. Richard Holmes has a genius for the job, as he showed fifteen years ago in his biography of Shelley. In a sense, there is no need to bring Coleridge to life, but in this compelling narrative of those early years of the poet Holmes makes us seem actually to be ...”

“... is: ‘Stupstraight’. Julia Kristeva might call Helfgott’s way with words ‘semiotic’. Richard Alleva, in Commonweal, calls him ‘a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings and surreal wordplays compose a weirdly poetic discourse’: a description that would apply as well to Helfgott’s more obvious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he and Louis should kidnap Frank’s wife and demand a million bucks for her return. He recruits Richard, a Nazi with a gun collection, to help them out, and they snatch Mickey Dawson from her suburban home. The most compelling parts of the book narrate Mickey’s thoughts as she gradually comes to understand what a terrible loser she’s married to and how ...”

“... extinction. Back in 1975, Spens replaced Peter Townsend as editor of Studio International with Richard Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually ...”

“... man. In the opening chapter of the book their chosen victim is Molly’s former husband, Richard, a vaguely plutocratic figure. They laugh at him: he, quite simply, fails to understand them. And who could? They both exist at the fag-end of a number of exhausted possibilities. They have both been members of the Communist Party. They have both ...”

“... Velazquez ‘conceived and realised’ what Brown calls ‘a style of court decoration which may justly claim a place as one of the wonders of the Baroque age’, in the Alcazar, the principal palace in Madrid, and also in the Escorial. And this was not all. In 1652, the King appointed his painter aposentador mayor del palacio, an office which put him in ...”

“... itself took the form of a collection of pensées) are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness ...”

“... the corporate first division. On the strength of its success, it made another evolutionary leap in May 1990, by opening the first Super Crown in Alexandria, Virginia. These new establishments were (for the time) mega-large: public library-sized, as their publicity pointed out. A Super Crown was duly erected on South Lake, replacing its diminutive ...”

“... to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a fiction. The Victorians who came after him would never have permitted anything like ...”

“... of ‘obscenity’). It says on page 3, wrongly, that in the same case John Mortimer defended Richard Neville, and on page 122 that he did not. In one of the brief excursions into cinema, there is a very muddled account of the French treatment of pornographic films. Pasolini’s Salo was not assigned to the ‘P’ category and sent to the blue ...”