“... lives in the Samburu country of northern Kenya. He resembles a tanned, lined version of Sherlock Holmes with a broken nose, and seems to have rejected most of the pleasures of civilisation except for Earl Grey tea. Thesiger’s life has been in the Buchan mould. It is true that, unlike Auberon Herbert (‘the man who was Greenmantle’), he was never pressed ...”

“... he sent William Holland to Newgate for issuing the pamphlets of Tom Paine, but not for publishing Richard Newton’s scandalous political caricatures. Newton, a brilliant cartoonist who died at the age of 21, is the subject of an exhibition and catalogue from the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester. When Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity ...”

“... joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises political journalists, a recovering drunk of the type that is angry with everybody all the time, a ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan Cantos. My feeling is that Pound’s stock is rising, and that one reason for ...”

“... The radical journalist​, author and activist Richard Gott died last month at the age of 87. One of the ‘sharpest reporters of revolutionary Latin America’, according to his friend Tariq Ali, he reported for the Guardian on the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and on Che Guevara, whose body he identified, and later wrote for the LRB on Chávez and Venezuela ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He understood that his authority would never be disputed as long as he kept his sole client – Richard Nixon – pleased. Kissinger knew that as an outsider he would never be totally trusted by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and other Nixon loyalists on the White House staff. But he also realised that he was an oasis of intellect and of knowledge about foreign ...”

“... and invasion plans. Yet the government wasn’t of one mind. The secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, remained anxious to build better relations with Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England ...”

“... which would have excluded not only John Wilkins (that was his object) but also John Milton and Richard Baxter. The discussion has here been conveniently shelved by agreeing to describe the ethos of the Royal Society as ‘latitudinarian’. Latitudinarians included virtually all those ‘Puritans’ who ‘conformed to the Church of England’ in 1660. By ...”

“... a Loaded Gun’, which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil War, Wuthering Heights, Richard III and Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.Singularities was written on the heels of My Emily Dickinson. I picked it up soon after it was published, accustomed by then to what was broadly, and belligerently, in the air at the ...”

“... wasted attempts to ingest material of no value whatever. Both like Kipling, Conrad, the Sherlock Holmes stories, P.G. Wodehouse, George Moore in selected books, while (notwithstanding the fact that these were Lyttelton’s old pupils) both look on Orwell as overrated, and neither has much enthusiasm for Connolly. Lyttelton is unexpectedly lukewarm about ...”

“... men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced ...”

“... security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that. Not only was Hoover, as head of the FBI, America’s leading policeman: he enjoyed an extraordinary ...”