“... him. Post-revolutionary Ireland was never comfortable with him, nor he with it: a central theme of Richard English’s absorbing study is O’Malley’s ambivalence towards Irish pieties, and his efforts to define the Ireland he had fought for. The country he had envisaged would have revered the writings of uncompromising Modernists like his friend Samuel ...”

“... effectively ends in January 1973. Kissinger’s period as Secretary of State under both Nixon and Ford is treated in a few cursory pages. There is no conclusion, no place in which the reader is invited to stand back and reflect on the meaning of the evidence presented, just a low-key epilogue in which Mr Hersh tells us briefly what happened to Mr Nixon, Dr ...”

“... Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from the commentators. Take the case of Richard Nixon. He is described as having been simply a politician, a pure politician without principle other than that of acquiring and hanging on to office. But how does this explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of ...”

“... missile defence and a federally subsidised supersonic commercial airliner. One of the advisers, Richard Garwin, a renowned physicist who chaired a White House study of supersonic flight, testified against the project in Congress, to the outrage and astonishment of Nixon’s gang. Garwin later explained that his loyalty was to truth and sound policy, not to ...”

“... Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book for ...”

“... Women (?1623) seem to her to possess a kind of social realism absent from the work of Webster, Ford, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher. In their treatment of social mobility and ambition, women and marriage, and in their ethical and religious overtones, they reflect the values of the City and Country as opposed to the Court party. Puritanism and Theatre ...”

“... Swan is fraught and analytic, with a temper that’s late Jacobean. It’ll be perfect, say, for Ford, but, given its verticality, a challenge to any actor fond of working down-stage. Since it’s due for ‘topping out’, the place swarms with builders, many with names that reach back to the Shakespeare records. Quineys, Halls and Shakeshafts are ...”

“... making a number of smoothly-meshing points around central images – crusade, change, the future. Richard Nixon, for his part, was apt to jump from dignity to folksiness, as if the strain of keeping up a high tone was too much. The most deviant of the post-war acceptance speeches was Harry Truman’s in 1948. Today, if you read the speech rather than ...”

“... and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... lifetime, the book consists of six wide-ranging essays which were originally delivered as the Ford Lectures when Professor Collinson visited Oxford in 1979, and which have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained. Many other scholars have recently explored the ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second Street, however, Hollywood, like Henry Ford, conquered the world by mass production: in this instance, of dreams. Its fundamental concern was with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as measured by box-office returns. The musical analogue of Hollywood has, of course, been profoundly imbued ...”

“... details of these not exclusively poetic proceedings? – how Cummings took girls out in the family Ford, though he and his friends ‘respected the chastity of the Cambridge and Brookline girls they knew’, as was the custom in those far-off times; how ‘when they wanted more excitement they picked up girls in Central Square’; how he once ‘reached a ...”