“... six feet, impulsive and urban’. Not so stimulating, if we’re to take Updike’s word, were Richard Maple and many of his cousins. With Mary and the four Updike children as his most generous sources, Begley is able to trace the degree of autobiography present in Updike’s fiction. It’s in many places very high. When Mary and John separated after two ...”

“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made and ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian right. We should not discount the vital progressive function performed by a learned clergy exposed to ...”

“... tutor, John Pentland Mahaffy, once crawled into a roomful of clergymen dressed in a tigerskin rug. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, could occasionally be seen swinging on chains in front of his palace, smoking a pipe. Even the modern-minded Charles Stewart Parnell was hag-ridden with superstition, while Yeats regularly conversed with spirits. Bram Stoker ...”

“... because she’s a ‘very hot woman’, his revulsion over the martyred sanctification of David Foster Wallace (‘the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation’), and his slating of the Best Picture winner Moonlight as a ‘victim narrative’ capturing Hollywood’s sympathy vote. Ellis’s oft-expressed irritation with the ...”

“... family servant, Lenchen Demuth, gave birth to a son. The boy, named Freddy Demuth, was put out to foster parents but kept in touch with the family and lived on until 1929. It was a not untypical Victorian family drama: the marriage was saved by Engels’s claim of paternity, a claim which he admitted on his deathbed was false and had been made at Marx’s ...”

“... among the first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The Buildings of England and an admirable successor to Nairn and Bridget Cherry, is on the money when he calls Witley a ...”

“... rest of it, by the author alone. The crew of distinguished pen-men who helped him in the past – Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott and others – has for the most part been laid off. It is understandable why, after all these years, Brodsky should wish to tackle the job single-handed: poets are seldom natural collaborators, and praise for his command ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... This truth to the ideals of a handcrafted world, and the social relations which it would foster, simplified – or blinkered – his view of things; he could believe in solutions where a more worldly commentator would see no hope. Called in to advise on the planning of Jerusalem at the time of the Balfour Declaration, he encouraged Chipping ...”

“... National Gallery was conceived of as an institution that would both honour British painting and foster its further development. We are reminded by Judy Egerton’s magnificent new catalogue of British painting in the National Gallery that the founding collection of 38 paintings included nine British works (by Hogarth, Reynolds and Wilkie, the last of whom ...”

“... of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the title ‘Irish Identities’, he developed an approach to the problem more complex than that of any earlier nationalist leader. At the same time, he made very explicit his belief that ‘ultimately there has to be a ...”

“... Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, and Paul Aylin, now the assistant director of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College. You might think that their task was relatively straightforward. After all, the figure that matters here, the mortality rate, is simply the number of patients who died after treatment divided by the number of patients who were ...”

“... 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 building, its design, manufacture and ...”