“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... the fascinating account of the colonisation of Barbados published in 1657 by the English agent Richard Ligon. Many planters remained nervous about bringing religion to their slaves in the 18th century. Even as some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘Richard Benyon is Britain’s wealthiest parliamentarian, worth around £110 million. Despite having … applauded the government for “reforming Labour’s something for nothing welfare culture”, Benyon is paid £120,000 a year through housing ...”

“... written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV Shakespeare comes to understand and develop the potential of prose. But if ...”

“... Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters wanted, and did it very well. Nationalisation apart (and few of them ...”

“... activist whose left-wing aspirations are expressed by singing a song about hens ganging up on a fox. Esteban wants to kill this left-winger and is guided to his hide-out by his illegitimate grandson: but the old fool only manages to cut the chap’s fingers off. Later, Esteban makes his grandson into a policeman, hoping he will use his authority for the ...”

“... this. The opium trade, they believed, demeaned and disgraced the whole enterprise. The Radical Richard Cobden thought it showed the British up as ‘bullies’ and ‘cowards’. The imperialist Lord Elgin claimed it revealed ‘how hollow and superficial’ were ‘both their civilisation and their Christianity’. Gladstone thought it ‘covered this ...”

“... no matter by whom, what has become of it? Fravor, when asked about the origins of the UFO by a Fox News presenter shortly after the footage was released, said that he believed it was ‘not from this world’. The release of the footage may be strange, but the mechanism of its release is stranger still. To The Stars was founded by Tom DeLonge, who used to ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... cannot rescue him from ignominy. The whole point of Wilsonism, after all, was to box and fox through the burning minute. It is hardly surprising that the long-term verdict on him should be bad: he despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the ...”

“... Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from ...”

“... partly mistaken if we suppose that the language of the Prayer Book was popular language. As Adam Fox has recently explained in Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700, early modern England consisted of a huge variety of ‘speech communities’, local and occupational. These languages were not mutually comprehensible, and while they caused real ...”

“... not the slightest hint of why Browning should have written it in the first place. Perhaps the old fox had a point after all. We have to start again, and aim at another point of vantage. Two stories are bound up in The Ring and the Book. One is the story on which the action of the poem is founded: the trial of Count Guido Franceschini for the murder of his ...”