“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... about which we know a great deal, from documentary evidence and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon ...”

“... In one of several investigative reports on the topic, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr wrote in May 2017 that ‘what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can ...”

“... 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant authorities alike was that men faced damnation in dissembling their faith. Nevertheless, a way around the dilemma was found in the doctrine of mental reservation, which was most fully developed in ...”

“... have been perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply ...”

“... Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a period that was culturally significant, an explosion of energy’, which she contrasts with the shameful ...”

“... greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic ...”

“... Charterhouse of Parma’ appears in a few sentences on the last page of the novel, so he may as well call it that. The Charterhouse of Parma begins with a brilliant and incisive encapsulation of the Napoleonic romance, and its effect on Europe and on society. Any orthodox novel reader, picking up this excellent new translation by Richard ...”

“... of confrontation which he has used against the British printing unions in the Wapping dispute may hark back to his 19th-century predecessor as proprietor of the Times, but they were perfected in the US management-union wars of the 1970s, which were quite unarguably won by the managements. Equally clearly, the British unions had not learnt the lessons. All ...”

“... dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the better-off, and may relate this prosperity to the new, British dimension. Given the ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... He and I taught together at University College London in the 1970s. These personal allusions may savour of the excessive. Let me plead that they serve as an introduction to the uncertainties and inconsistencies of his experience of life, to his changing fortunes, contrasting reputations, to the human interest and eccentric charm of Stephen. Of the ...”

“... Maxwell Fyfe’s speech came in the triumphal wake of the Congress of Europe, held in The Hague in May 1948 with Churchill as its honorary chairman and 750 delegates from 17 European countries. Although the congress possessed no governmental authority, its cultural committee drew up a charter of fundamental rights to be enforced by a continental supranational ...”

“... An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and conventional colleagues. In responsible subjects such as the natural sciences, such people rebel against the demand only at their peril – or rather, their ideas will succeed only if the demand is, in the end, obeyed, and the colleagues turn out merely to have been too cautious ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe ...”