“... be manipulated ‘as a convenience for the rich and powerful to save themselves from criticism’. Richard Ingrams, then editor of Private Eye, suggested that, since he felt so strongly, Waugh might stand for Parliament himself. It’s possible Ingrams was joking, but Waugh took up the suggestion and ran in Thorpe’s North Devon constituency for the Dog ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and ...”

“... the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well as Ingrid Bergman, Constance Cummings and Katharine Hepburn. Most of the expatriate film people Sayre met in Frognal had ...”

“... once to transact business and once as a study group at which political and historical texts were read and discussed. From mid-1794, each division was subdivided into ‘tithings’, groups of ten members living in contiguous streets, whose intimacy would help ensure attendance at divisional meetings and make it harder for spies to infiltrate the Society. The ...”

“... parties, but from people who don’t think of themselves as having a political affiliation at all. Richard Daley Jr, Mayor of Chicago and son of Richard Daley Sr who ran the city for nearly twenty years, is said to be ‘more into government than politics’. Yuri Luzhkov was re-elected Mayor of Moscow in 1996 with an ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... or by collaging them, or simply by using them as source material, as with work by Francis Bacon or Richard Hamilton. Photography has long been used by artists as a substitute for drawing or as an iconic intermediary between reality and representation.Richter makes use of photographs in a way which is both extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, and extremely ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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,’ ...”

“... 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 ...”