“... claim in the title. Small question marks apart, the Companion will redraw the literary map. Richard Altick’s latest book takes as its thesis the unfashionable view that novels reflect life. Professor Altick retired some time ago, and obviously relishes the freedom of not having to follow critical fashion. ‘After many years of criticism that has ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... of Firbankian tristesse’), but the entire Constant section relies far too heavily on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... years her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”

“... in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course is the subject’s greatest challenge. Few if any of us possess the necessary breadth of knowledge and skills which such a wide-angled view of the ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... similar to Mahler’s’, La Grange writes – and that Felix Weingartner would undergo after him. Richard Strauss, Böhm, Karajan and Maazel were later victims. The Viennese love nothing better than to greet a new director as a saviour and then to peck him to pieces. (Seiji Ozawa is next in line for the booby-trapped throne.) Mahler’s Jewishness was used ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”

“... apart in age and came from different worlds. Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his ...”

“... most of us did at school, is the world’s most perfect Desert Island Disc. To name it a classic may be beside the point. It is more like a myth or symbol that has got under the skin and into the secret memory of an astonishing number of readers and (above all) writers. Along with, say, Hamlet, the Ancient Mariner may be ...”

“... for Christian ideological reasons, together with popular observance of a handful of customs that may or may not predate Christianity – bonfires on Midsummer Night, for instance. Medieval European Catholic Christian elites created a continent-wide identity, which one Anglo-Saxon writer under the patronage of King Alfred ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”