“... by Stoic writers such as Seneca in particular. Seneca, who was, after all, a Spaniard, was much read in 17th-century Spain, especially in the court milieu. Olivares was represented as a second Seneca in a play by Quevedo, and the Count-Duke’s own library contained a number of works by the Neo-Stoic writer Justus Lipsius. It may not be altogether fanciful ...”

“... has any cognitive privilege after all. ‘The difference between his description and ours,’ in Richard Rorty’s words, ‘may mean that he should not be tried under our laws. It does not mean that he cannot be explained by our science.’ Realism, the doctrine that things are as they are independent of any description of them, can only be false for things ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... places the burden of compassion on the reader. It didn’t happen that way. In his introduction Richard Pevear makes the case that Russia’s liberal intelligentsia mistakenly labelled Leskov a reactionary on the basis of a carelessly worded editorial he wrote in the Northern Bee in 1862, seemingly linking radicals to a spate of suspicious fires in St ...”

“... appear in texts from the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or ...”

“... There was even rain ‘Yorkshiring down with vertical vengeance’.Myers’s first proper novel, Richard (2010), was about the Manic Street Preachers lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who went missing after leaving a London hotel in 1995 on the eve of the band’s US tour. Two weeks after his disappearance, his car was found at a motorway service ...”

“... Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to rough up the bourgeois middle. What can one do with a once-loyal Marxist who ...”

“... the visitor who delights in the first also thrills, secretly, to the second. In Blood in the City, Richard Burton takes his readers on a walking tour of Parisian sacrifice and slaughter. He moves from the Bastille to the place de la Concorde (where Louis XVI was executed), to the Hôtel de Ville (where successive generations of revolutionaries raised the flag ...”

“... of Starbucks in 2004. As in a Paris café, you could drink your espresso, eat your croissant, read your paper, check your email. Perhaps buy a book, or five, or none. The superstores kept theatre-restaurant hours, staying open into the night. There were armchairs between the racks. As one B&N publicity statement put it (intending self-praise), these were ...”

“... extent, the enterprise succeeded, working its magic for several decades.The War Memoirs should be read neither as a work of literature nor as historical testimony. François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 and a fervent Gaullist, thought them worthy of Bossuet and Pascal – two masters of 17th-century French prose, but theologians ...”

“... artist and comedian of terror, was beginning to lose his audience. Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read’s weasels were infecting the landscape with rumours: all the creeping, ugly dream-things the Twins had always vigorously suppressed were daring to emerge by daylight. The aura of magical protection that encircled these backlands, the dusty parcel of ...”

“... day could be, as well as expressing the literary likes and dislikes of two reasonably well-read men of different generations. There is rather too much cricket for my own taste, but Alan Ross – perhaps the only writer on cricket I can assimilate – is extolled early on as ‘the first poet’ to report an MCC tour in ...”

“... down a few doors, leaning on unusual suspects. John Jasper is an avatar of the patricide painter Richard Dadd. Dadd, by this account, lost his marbles under an Egyptian sun, trying to keep pace with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Phillips couldn’t keep still: he drove on remorselessly. As Seabrook sweeps through Egyptology, psychological profiling, snap ...”

“... Or, as she put it herself, unromantically, when she won the Booker: ‘In the stories I used to read when I was a little girl cab-horses used to win the National . . . but you can’t expect this in real life.’ The letters make clear how far from reality both the public perception and to some extent the private, self-deprecating persona were. For one ...”

“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”