“... plod along as lawyers, journalists, publishers, bankers, writers, public servants. None of us can read this biography without a sense of intellectual degeneracy and that is our inheritance, together with his love of adventure and weakness for tobacco. What has been lost in the intervening fifty years is not money or social position or Mr Baldwin’s car or ...”

“... on the Continent. In the early 17th century libraries of more than a thousand volumes were rare: Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury between 1604 and 1610, had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of ...”

“... finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”

“... has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the story. In different ways, Richard Burton and Aneurin Bevan (Beaverbrook’s ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) were also champion putters-on. So, in a rather minor key, were at least half the members of my mother’s extended family. In a putting-it-on competition between Roy Jenkins and my ...”

“... in concluding that ‘in spite of its faults it seems to me better and more tragic every time I read it.’ Poetry must in its own way be perfect, but the novel, as Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the absolute’, and gains in its own ways from its lapses and imperfections. Peter Levi has a poet’s eye for Pasternak’s poetry, which he translates ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... characters the names of her intimate friends. Julia Briggs shows that two of Nesbit’s lovers – Richard Reynolds and Oswald Barron – are saluted in the figures of Dicky and Oswald Bastable. She also suggests that in these books Nesbit represented herself as twins: a weedy boy poet and his spirited sister. The weed’s name is Noel: Mrs Briggs has ...”

“... argued, but frequently shot down. ‘Tony Crosland is fifteen times the man Fred Mulley is,’ Richard Cross-man noted on one occasion, ‘but dim little Mulley boring away at his departmental brief gets the Department’s way ... whereas despite his brilliance Tony often doesn’t even succeed in helping his Department.’ Crosland gave a bleakly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... darkness’). I suppose the point is that gemina nox ‘lacks authority’. But Catullus had not read the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and the hypallage is not so unusual. Goold’s translation is in prose, but follows Catullus’s lineation. Very occasionally it lapses into metre (‘Attis borne in speedy vessel/on the crest of seas profound’), and equally ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... are advised to close their eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything ...”