“... of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ignored: he is surely our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie, ‘making-strange’. Architecture, as an art form, isn’t quite mundane ...”

“... and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine was not beleued of vs sodainly, but by their continuall ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... activity) proves a lucid and well-informed guide to the workings of the Parliamentary party. Richard Kelly usefully distils his work on the party conference and James Kellas is able to deploy his wide knowledge of Scottish politics to chart the Conservatives’ failure north of the border. Richard Cockett draws on his ...”

“... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal better ...”

“... in The Pink and the Green that it begins to seem its unfocused, perhaps undiscovered subject. Richard Howard’s version is fluent and graceful, catching as few translations do the bounce and abruptness of Stendhal’s voice, and has only a handful of small errors. Howard renders esprit variously as ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... The word ‘meme’, popularised by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation’. But the idea that culture is transmitted by imitation and learning in a manner analogous but not reducible to natural selection has been around for a long time, and many other terms have been used in describing it ...”

“... some of them lazily written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but ...”

“... his performance of Mozart’s Fantasia for piano, K 475, a piece of music that obsessed me. Then Richard Eyre, who had just moved from the Nottingham Playhouse to the BBC, asked me to write a television play and I abandoned the story. I thought that by distracting myself, by doing something completely different, I could come back refreshed to my non-existent ...”

“... poor. One night was ruined by rain. President Carter did not attend, though a letter from him was read out. The whole business somehow bore the stamp of the Carter Presidency: well-intentioned, honourable, open to every mischance that poor timing, faltering tact and sheer haplessness could bring about. It was rich, too, in the kind of gauchely well-meaning ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... have produced a book which is not only even more up-to-date than the rest but a real pleasure to read. Just what a revolution in Viking studies these books achieve and represent is clearly, if unintentionally, revealed by the reissue of Johannes Bronsted’s The Vikings, which was first published in Danish in 1960, and appeared posthumously in English five ...”

“... was as mystifying as a book written by a judge and called Overcoming Law. The judge in this case, Richard Posner, is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer in law at Chicago University and a widely published polemicist. At the heart of his polemics are three pulses, legal pragmatism, Millian ...”

“... back to see where it started. The danger is exacerbated even now by memories from school. Till I read N.A.M. Rodger’s book I could not have placed Richard Grenville and the Revenge within twenty years, nor had any idea what he was doing ‘at Flores in the Azores’; nor do I know even yet (for Rodger is certainly not ...”