“... of illness or deficiency, a ‘pestilential handicap’. Welles’s rich but ineffectual father, Richard, an alcoholic and ‘natural citizen of the demi-monde’, loved his son, but was mostly legless in his last years, so that the son (himself capable of drinking ‘as much as two bottles of spirits a day’) became ‘parent to the parent’. Throughout ...”

“... and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”

“... to exclude anyone who had worked on TSEs from its membership. In his statement to the Inquiry, Sir Richard Southwood, professor of zoology at Oxford, said: ‘we agreed that we should avoid those who were involved in the controversy surrounding the nature of the agent.’ Phillips disagrees with this approach, arguing that the composition of a scientific ...”

“... by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”

“... to Hastings. They were violent and sometimes cruel: when peasants in Normandy sent envoys to Duke Richard II to ask for the continuation of their customary rights to wood and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from Richard’s Viking ...”

“... have injected an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... and his liking for ‘the study of morbid cases of the soul’ – is among the worst-edited (by Richard Curle, 1937); moreover, the original manuscripts are lost and one can only hope that Kelley and Hudson find them before their edition reaches the 1860s. The edition of the love letters by Elvan Kintner (1969) is impressive but by no means definitive: it ...”

“... place both in France and in Britain, but certainly not in the same manner. Social historians like Richard Cobb have done such amazing work on the French Revolution, studying the minutest lineaments of ‘the real thing’, that one begins to look for their sort of history in a historical novel and to feel thwarted when such topics are ruled out of court by ...”

“... behalf. Structured in short episodic chunks, Slide focuses on the mid-life melancholy of one Richard Verey, a 35-year-old Englishman. Oxford-educated, old-shoe patrician, Verey is trying to recover pieces of a life that seems to have passed him by, beginning as a student on vacation in Iran. In a village outside Isfahan he buys a set of antique Russian ...”

“... The American Cancer (a title of 1931) threatened the French way of life. The war had bled France white, economic crisis had destabilised it further. The French began to question themselves, their status as a power, their national security and national values. Stereotypes coined in the 19th century were dusted off and brought up to date. American ...”

“... stories. I never saw the programmes, but I believe some quite good writers, like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, contributed. Despite my lack of familiarity with the stories, I do quite well with this machine. Old machines with their slowed-down responses are generally easier to win on – unless, that is, one or two of the flippers have seized up. The ...”

“... areas of flesh colour, buff and sandy brown are contrasted with neat patterns of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably indicate) by black frames. But when commissioned to paint larger and more complex narratives he ...”

“... story, ‘A Vignette’, is the first-person narrator repeatedly haunted by the horrifying white face that appears at the hole in the gate of the fir plantation. Indeed, I haven’t noticed the word ‘haunted’ used much anywhere else in the stories. James declared himself dissatisfied with ‘A Vignette’ as ‘short and ill written’. On the ...”