“... to which television values have penetrated British politics. It would, however, be misleading to read the British experience as simply the American one with a time-lag. For there are two strands in our island story. One is the increasing sophistication of politicians and party machines in using television for propaganda purposes. The other is the problematic ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... ago, and of the response of the rest of the world to the disaster that followed. The book can be read at several levels: as a memorial to a society that no longer exists, as a footnote to the history of the wars in Indochina and their aftermath, as the story of a large international relief operation, and as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian motives can ...”

“... and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many months ago answered Alistair Elliott’s more brutal review in the TLS – have every reason to wonder that Tomlinson should still solicit the suffrages of a public that shows him such ill-will. He must be, so it must seem, either ...”

“... wife to any husband. The book, though physically attractive and lavishly illustrated, is a hard read. What is it that keeps one going through a long sequence of letters with their arbitrary reference to time and place and their detailed personal content? Usually their literary value and/or narrative arrangement. Vera Stravinsky’s letters have more of the ...”

“... and a willingness to immerse himself in the literature of its past. It’s true that he has read widely, but far too many of the works on which he relies are long out of date, in part because he feels current scholarship is distorted by ‘political correctness’. Thus, in discussing the impact of the early settlers on the North American ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... lectures, was blackballed from the 1924 expedition, while one member of the committee vetoed Richard Graham because he had been a conscientious objector. Mallory, to his credit, condoned neither decision, but once again the party was deprived of three of the finest climbers available, with Frank Smythe also being left off the list. Finch had not only ...”

“... well known to us ‘in person’ (friends, lovers, colleagues), and even about the writers we read, we do not believe such things about relative strangers – that beautiful young man at the gym, that horrible troll there – and neither, as a rule, do we believe them about celebrities. We believe from reading him that Oscar Wilde – in person – was ...”

“... prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope’. Hollinghurst, however, clearly has read Trollope, another of this novel’s forebears. The guests at Toby’s party include various members of the Tory Party, from the home secretary on down (the prime minister isn’t there, to everyone’s simultaneous disappointment and relief); a photographer ...”

“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... my life I woke up wanting to do something to make it happen faster.’ As a schoolgirl Ypi reads Richard Wright, learns about the capitalist enemies who want to turn her beloved country into a shopping mall, and encounters odd European tourists, some of whom seem to pity her and some of whom treat her like a precious specimen. Small anxieties balloon in her ...”

“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular ...”

“... is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the terms that he ...”

“... The inevitable drawback is that his version is much bulkier than its predecessor, and difficult to read without a book stand, but it is worth the effort because it opens up huge and important vistas of social and economic history embodied in a built environment, now fully peopled with patrons, craftsmen, builders and the bulk of the ordinary population. This ...”