“... commanders, traders and amateur sleuths collected objects and relics from the area: signs of what may have become of the lost men. Handkerchiefs, soap, sponges, slippers, combs, forks and spoons were all brought back. One of the ships sent out after Franklin, the HMS Resolute, itself became trapped in the ice. Timbers from its hull were later retrieved and a ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... to be a non-person. Compare these events with the Chinese way of breaking with the Maoist past. As Richard McGregor shows in The Party, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’ proceeded in a radically different way. In the organisation of the economy (and, up to a point, the culture), what is usually perceived as ‘Communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were ...”

“... his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by Richard III. The new king, Henry VII, refers to pursuing the pretender in his quest for sanctuary: ‘How closely we have hunted/This cub, since he ...”

“... is perhaps the last of his judgments on himself. This is said to be an autobiographical novel, and Richard Lourie, in his introduction, calls it ‘the culmination of everything he has so far written’, but it strikes me more as an elegy, a jazz elegy in five movements, of which three are very much more important than the others. Like Ratushinskaya, Sinyavsky ...”

“... and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers shuffling forward now with hands raised to claim equal credit in these endeavours. What is true is that Almendros used the methods as thoroughly and successfully as anyone, and was bold about applying them in major ...”

“... afterwards that she becomes Lessing enough to blame people for thinking Somers is not her: Some may think this is a detached way to write about Doris Lessing, as if I were not she, it is the name I am detached about. After all, it is the third name I’ve had: the first, Tayler, being my father’s; the second, Wisdom (now try that one on for size!), my ...”

“... people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media intelligentsia and ...”

“... close competitor was brought out from the shadows where he now lurks, uncollected and unread. For Richard Holt Hutton was a prodigious and impressive critic. And unlike Arnold he made literary (and theological) criticism his profession. Hutton was the author of about seven thousand reviews and essays. He edited the Spectator from 1861 until his death in ...”

“... embodied the restless, forward movements of his era, ‘the spirit of the age’. In his new book Richard Jay has explained how and why this happened. There have been several biographies and studies of Chamberlain, but this is the best analysis of the public man, finely wrought and exact, and undoubtedly demanding of the reader. Old politics can be very stale ...”

“... with Roman citizenship, which their sons would inherit. In the book accompanying the exhibition, Richard Abdy, one of the curators, quotes Yann Le Bohec’s characterisation of the army as a ‘machine for creating Roman citizens’, at least until the Emperor Caracalla’s edict of 212 which extended citizenship to all free subjects of the ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the Poets’ Theatre in the early days,’ Lurie writes, ‘was high, for most of the younger writers and their friends were ...”

“... letters. The postman always announced his presence with a ‘burst of prophetic whistling’. In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed ...”

“... for representing the world as it is. Reported detail is not just roughage but nourishment, and Richard Price’s Lazarus Man could have been written in honour of Wolfe’s prescriptions.Wolfe proposed journalism as a necessary ingredient of consequential fiction, repeating the prediction he made in 1973 in The New Journalism that the future of the novel ...”