“... a whirling dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and found another.’ It’s as if Sir Richard Burton had set out to write a Mills and Boon romance. Brick Lane truly comes alive only when its male characters, particularly the older ones, enter the fray. This isn’t just because they are more gabby and engaged, less likely to be sitting at ...”

“... the wicked caricatures of recognisable players from James Carville (the novel’s ragin’ Cajun, Richard Jemmons, defined by a ‘vehement opacity’) to Jesse Jackson (the Rev. Luther Charles, defined by rage, who had ‘peaked in full Afro and dashiki’ and now looked ‘plucked ... Luther in a suit was like Dukakis in a tank’). In the second ...”

“... return on 17 June, with all games to be played without spectators. What the Premier League CEO, Richard Masters, has called ‘the behind closed doors product’ will be a very different viewing experience from the one we’re used to. Computer-generated fans have been mooted. Work is reportedly underway on an app that will make it possible for fans to ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of ...”

“... that stiff walk, that narrow mouth, those cold eyes, the spectacles!’ The Observer’s attorney, Richard Hartley QC, asked Meacher about damages: ‘That is what you are wanting? The money was to punish the Observer?’ And Meacher replied: ‘A modest punishment, yes. That is right. Because unless people are punished they will do it again. That is one of ...”

“... felt there were simply too many books: ‘a vast Chaos and confusion’, according to Robert Burton. ‘The longest life of a man,’ John Cotgrave lamented, ‘is not sufficient to explore so much as the substance of them, which (in many) is but slender.’ Thus careful reading was figured as a kind of profitable destruction: an act of discrimination ...”

“... with them, and what, exhausted, exhilarated or astonished, they carry away. Lovers on the Nile is Richard Hall’s account of Samuel Baker’s voyage in search of the Mountains of the Moon with his young companion Florence. It is not so much a biography as the story of a seven-year travelling honeymoon. In fact, the book flows at an easy pace, but only once ...”

“... a survivor from Auschwitz – judiciously and movingly linked the musical episodes in Humphrey Burton’s Unitel film (shown the following day on BBC 2), the nature of the occasion was essentially public – which is to say, a prey to those acts of political and social publicity which can render all such occasions, however solemn, profoundly if not ...”

“... for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private hospital as Richard Arnot, a surgeon. What actually occurred at the party is still the subject of dispute, and is related to a pending legal action. But everyone knows what happened afterwards. The following morning Helen Smith’s body was lying in a courtyard beneath the ...”

“... his Mortlake lodgings. He turns out to be a fanatic who has been robbing the grave of Sir Robert Burton. The narrator traps him in the tomb, and masquerading as the avenging Christian, exorcises the holy vandal by terror. The story resounds with nice jokes about national decline and reverse colonialism. And the whole thing hovers on the edge of the utterly ...”

“... Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their sex lives native, too. Gardner Wilkinson had so many sexual partners on tap that he happily shared ‘his houses, his interests and his women’ with like-minded travellers. Hay and ...”

“... to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... to imply that Montaigne scholarship is an Augean stables, and the condescension aimed at the late Richard Sayce seems quite gratuitous. The crusading zeal against the ET heresy frequently becomes inhibiting, a self-denying ordinance. Thus Marianne Meijer’s otherwise learned and absorbing analysis of the persona of Socrates in Montaigne’s last three ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a ...”

“... bring him a handful of the better international medals – those bearing the names of Livingstone, Burton and Lawrence. Thesiger was ‘the first British child born in Abyssinia’, where his father, the British minister, had been escorted to the legation by a tyrant none the less dangerous for having been castrated as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of ...”