“... a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, ‘Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.’ That is also stylish after its own fashion – a fashion that calls upon us compassionately to interpret the undertold tale. One’s first impression of Black Idol is of ...”

“... would be worth it: ‘200 children’, he noted, at ‘$5 to 10,000 [per] kid’ was a small price compared to the money to be made from uninterrupted smelting. This flagrant, shameless spreading of poison for profit is a source of indignation throughout Fraser’s book. There are acidic portrayals of Guggenheim heirs – Peggy, in her Venetian palazzo ...”

“... last so long, that there is room to voice a few regrets. Everything, even the enjoyable, has its price, and the price of the pleasures of ‘advocacy’ can seem at moments a high one; an advocate, after all, is only a man paid to tell lies on one’s behalf in a court of law. The claims, in short, of the Muse are not ...”

“... left some of the investigators fearful that even more important moles remained undiscovered. Sir Roger Hollis, the director-general of MI5, David Murphy, the CIA chief of Soviet Bloc Intelligence, and James Bennett, head of Canadian counter-espionage, were all denounced as likely Soviet agents by conspiracy theorists within their own services. In his ...”

“... that were bestsellers, and The Mersey Sound, which contained work by the performance poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, was certainly that, selling more than half a million copies. But, shared by just three poets, it was not an anthology in the usual sense. Rather, it was Volume 10 in the Penguin Modern Poets series, launched in ...”

“... crises later – the Bretton Woods system had collapsed and the dollar with it, while the gold price had risen to more than twenty times its old value. This gave the French Treasury one of the greatest speculative killings in history – by then the laughter had altogether ceased. De Gaulle’s foresight was uncanny; and not just because, at the age of ...”

“... that its hero, a man named Flange, ‘wants children – why it isn’t clear – but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an adult woman. His solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size and demeanour of a child.’ Pynchon seems compelled retrospectively to imagine alternatives which were never available to the characters in the ...”

“... craftsmen, and left well alone by the authorities, was put up for public auction with a guide price of £250,000. This alerted a number of successful local artists hungry for more space. The ruin fetched more than a million pounds and will cost almost as much again to rebuild and restore. David Mills, quietly living in a gothic shell for which nobody ...”

“... problem with the edition is that it appears four years after a work of awe-inspiring excellence, Roger Lonsdale’s edition of Johnson’s Lives for the Clarendon Press. The Yale editors, with their legacy of scholarship from the 1950s, have not been able to incorporate Lonsdale’s findings, and their generally illuminating commentary is not sufficiently ...”

“... a couple of blocks from the Hudson River, in a pleasant apartment shared with the bookdealers, Roger and Irvyne Richards, the dedicatees (‘slayers of homelessness’) of Corso’s last substantial collection, Mindfield (1989). Herbert Huncke and Peter Orlovsky also hang out at the book room, living exhibits, marginals whose work has never quite been ...”

“... concise and to the point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by ...”

“... Great Stavropol Canal’. Privately, he was reading books of heretical Marxism: the works of Roger Garaudy and Gramsci, among others. In public he was ‘mouthing the party line while inwardly recoiling from much of it’. The decisive turn in his career came in the late 1970s, when he became the protégé of Yuri Andropov, the elderly head of the ...”

“... acquittal even of hardened and violent criminals whose liberty puts innocent people at risk is a price which society ought to be prepared to pay to ensure that no defendant is convicted if the defence can sustain an imputation of witness unreliability, police misconduct, prosecution carelessness, or judicial bias. To the ideologists of ‘crime ...”

“... monopoly to restrict the supply of an object in demand, in the interests of driving up its price (sometimes the two methods interact to create a two-tier monopoly, as in limited edition reproductions). Any monopoly reaps profits because restricting supply forces those consumers to declare themselves who are willing to pay over the odds. Artistic ...”

“... reformers might have risked their souls and their social standing by taking the separatist path. A price was paid for this holding operation. Puritan machinery created a church within a church, and in the 1640s the smaller church, with the help of its lay friends, destroyed the greater one. For however much blame we attach to Archbishop Laud, the fundamentally ...”