“... selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his work.’ A heavily edited ...”

“... This help was from the Lord; Thy blessing on thy people flows. (3) The sheer goofiness of Richard Crashaw in 1648, translating ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ as: Happy me! O happy sheep! Whom my God vouchsafes to keep; (23) (And later, ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters’ becomes, in part: ‘At my feet the blubb’ring Mountain/Weeping ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... history is not.’ Young Fritz started pre-med but ended up studying history at Columbia, where Allen Ginsberg was his debating partner. He stayed on for graduate school, left for a few years to teach at Cornell, and then took a job at his alma mater, where he has remained. And so ends the book-within-a-book that has drawn deservedly favourable ...”

“... Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ...”

“... all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act. Here is Richard Gere interviewed – although that is not quite the right word – by Cameron Docherty in the Independent last June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... one for public consumption. When Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was completed, five years later, Allen Tate, Lowell and others gave its studied historicism and technical effects unqualified approval. Berryman’s reputation was made, but his best work was still to come. The poem involves a modern, gnostic poet, for whom nothing is more important than writing ...”

“... Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole poem. This is a great, time-twisting gag, worthy of Woody Allen. A resurrected fictional character, cued by a reference to himself in his earlier incarnation, picks up and reads a work by a real-life poet. Coppola now seems to have invented Conrad, Kurtz and Eliot, but the only real agent here is literature. By ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who ...”

“... she arrived at the Royal College of Art the following year, it was ‘the place’, as the artist Allen Jones put it. The principal, Robin Darwin, hadn’t just brought it back from postwar torpor, he had reconnected it with industry and architecture. Windows for Coventry, designed by the RCA’s head of glass, Lawrence Lee, and his former students Keith New ...”

“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”

“... nearly died, and that the film was transformed by George Cukor, who came on set for a week after Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired and before Victor Fleming took over. Cukor changed the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road from oval to rectangular and gave the Wicked Witch a bun to make her look scarier. He transformed Dorothy from blonde to ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”