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“... never have been published at all had it not been for the intercession of the poet and translator Richard Howard, who was introduced to White by a friend who had met Howard at a West Village pick-up bar. Howard liked White’s manuscript, suggested revisions and eventually persuaded Random House to publish it. The publisher demanded that the ending be changed ...”

“... for T.H. Huxley, ‘the natural and irreconcilable enemies of science’. His professional rival Richard Owen, by contrast, considered those blind to the beauty of design in nature to be suffering from ‘some, perhaps, congenital, defect of mind’. But the trouble with reduction to polar opposites is that what really gets excluded are the middle positions ...”

“... with the pace of travel, but not the direction.Climate politics is a new front for Brexiters. Richard Tice, leader of the Reform (previously Brexit) Party, of which Farage is president, has repeatedly claimed that net zero is as divisive as EU membership. The party, which is running 120 candidates in the local elections, believes that the public mood is ...”

“... John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or Japan would be. Having those permanent garrisons abroad ‘keeps countries from doing things you ...”

“... The Routemaster was fiddled with, stretched, experimentally deprived of its red livery to lose weight, tentatively enclosed at the back. In a final throw before he retired, Durrant tried to turn the RM into a rear-engined, front-entry bus (in an evil hour it was nicknamed the Fruitmaster). But Leyland Buses had taken over the makers of the Routemaster and ...”

“... police preparations for the bank holiday weekend festival. ‘Committed historians’ was a phrase Richard Cobb used in The Police and the People to describe the police in France at the time of the Revolution. Their reports on crime and violence, in Cobb’s view, made them reliable witnesses, able to state what they had seen and heard, and to form an idea of ...”

“... it is as if Shakespeare at the time of The Tempest had been forced by an old contract to rewrite Richard III.) One way out of this quandary – for it does not feel right to historians that the golden years of the High Renaissance should leave behind such a central, equivocal instance of ‘progress’ – has been to doubt that what we see in London is ...”

“... have been a feature of conservative politics in the US since the Koch Brothers’ consigliere Richard Fink built their sprawling influence empire in the 1980s. What has changed is the ideological focus: the neoliberalism of the American Enterprise Institute is out; the Heritage Foundation’s traditionalism is in. Where there is influence, there is ...”

“... afterwards seal it’ (Macbeth V.i). It is handsome, expensive and chunky – Wheler gives its weight as ‘12 dwt’ (i.e. 12 pennyweights), which is equivalent to about two thirds of an ounce. One may call it a relic without intending any saintly or cultish overtone. It is just something left behind (literally ‘relinquished’) by the man who once ...”

“... suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in 1968, which Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major ...”

“... characters, without situations.’ That is what a certain tradition of philosophy does. But when Richard Rorty describes philosophy as turning to narrative and the imagination, pointing us towards solidarity through ‘the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’, we seem close to Kundera’s work, and to much traditional thinking ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... In a Sight and Sound interview with Richard Roud Bertolucci says he first had the idea for his film La Luna during a session with his psychoanalyst. ‘I suddenly realised that I had been talking about my father for seven or eight years – and now I wanted to talk about my mother.’ It seems to have taken them an unconscionable time to get around to discussing the person Freud calls a child’s ‘first seducer’, the authentic, original source of love and hunger, but Bertolucci certainly now attacks the subject with brio ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... Richard Branson​ is the mirror image of a Russian oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it ...”