“... relation to Gascoigne’s Supposes and of its folklore elements. Antony Hammond’s edition of Richard III argues, no less convincingly, for an early dating of that play (1591). His introduction includes a shrewd discussion of the importance of role-playing in the play, and of the ways in which the consequent Verfremdungseffekt ‘lessens the realistic and ...”

“... Zimbabwe with a roving commission on the continent – an appointment cutting across the role of Richard Hall, the paper’s Africa Correspondent. Nigel Hawkes, then Foreign News Editor, resigned that post in protest. The independent directors did not feel themselves called upon to adjudicate in that dispute since it was the editor’s own decision finally ...”

“... the musical notes with the rich specificity of verbal meaning. It is natural, then, that we should read Britten’s music in the light of the texts with which it is interpenetrated, and from there it is a short step to reading the music as a source of biographical insight. This is because so much of Britten’s most powerful music is associated with texts and ...”

“... That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed ...”

“... in Holland and northern France. The CIA might have avoided SOE’s disastrous errors if it had read London Calling North Pole by the Abwehr’s Major Hermann Giskes, who had run that operation.In 1956 Sichel moved to Hong Kong, where the agency had its eyes on China and Indonesia. When Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy ...”

“... Hawthorne on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’ (Ellison ...”

“... when it issues we-are-making-you-safer defences of weaponised drones. Doubts multiply when we read that the ‘CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when CIA targeters weren’t certain about exactly who it was they were killing’. Before acknowledging that ‘every drone strike is an execution,’ ...”

“... thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I hope that you will read it so you knowMy heart beats like a hammerAnd I stutter and I stammerEvery time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You made me love you.I ...”

“... only recently available), should Worthen’s book strike one as an exhausting slog to read? Of course it is a long book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but ...”

“... and, to cap and threaten it all, the War. Some of these, it must be said, are more rewarding to read than others. The best letters, as a rule, are those in which the correspondents are at a distance and not planning to meet soon: then what is to be said can’t be postponed till a tête-à-tête. When James had read Mrs ...”

“... including the editors. Five years ago they edited another collection, since widely-read: The Thatcher Effect, published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life ...”