“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... men in the country’. He graduated ‘magna cum laude in Literature especially Greek and English’ after taking courses which included some comparative literature and Grandgent’s course on Dante. Even then, ‘Harvard had a long tradition of emphasis on writing, especially creative writing,’ and students ‘were encouraged to write verse and ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...”

“... very level-headed on this question: he notes the mistakes made on both sides, some of which – as Richard Neustadt was the first to point out in his 1970 study Alliance Politics – actually arose from the intimate nature of the exchanges between the two governments and the false conclusions which this assumed intimacy was liable sometimes to promote. But he ...”

“... in science, having been born in Galton’s aristocratic notions of the natural worthiness of the English upper class, taken to its evil extreme by Nazi eugenicists, and too readily used by American scientists to rationalise racial injustice.’ Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, had explicitly raised the question of nature v. nurture with reference to ...”

“... reports. Garton Ash identifies the informers – someone at the Humboldt University, a lecturer in English literature, a British national who took the code-name ‘Smith’. The most interesting is ‘Michaela’, who worked in a state art-dealer’s and reported for years on subordinates, acquaintances, friends, even her daughter’s boyfriend – out of a ...”

“... night after night, and doing all those unspeakable things to her, was me.’ Marguerite’s boss, Richard Knox, has also been sleeping with Isobel, while the footnotes in After Absalon conclude with the revelation that Harold, discovered rootling through a wheelie bin, is alive and well. While the footnotes supply one ending, the main narrative leaves us with ...”

“... of plumbing.) Raulff sees this story and De Quincey’s tale of near death at high speed in ‘The English Mail-Coach’ as prescient narratives in which the horse is both harbinger of and impediment to the modernisation of the countryside. Raulff’s cultural history is full of live horses and dead asses, in the road, in the mills and mines, and on the ...”

“... the affection in which it is held by the architectural great and good’. Richard Rogers compared Robin Hood Gardens to a Nash terrace and claimed it was ‘one of the most outstanding social housing buildings in Britain’. Zaha Hadid said it was her favourite piece of architecture in London. Boughton prefers Kate Mackintosh’s ...”

“... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...”

“... significant way. And perhaps it wasn’t that new after all: there are examples of visual poems in English as early as the Elizabethan era, many of which he would have known. It’s less clear how well he knew Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), or the work of Apollinaire, who by 1916 had almost finished his Calligrammes, perhaps ...”

“... his effete literary efforts. The movie – inspired in part by Edward Albee’s Seascape and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and broken up by short quotes from Dostoevsky – has some stilted, uneven fun at the expense of one man’s writerly ambition, but doesn’t question the ambition itself. If anything, writing seems to represent for Franco an ...”

“... the start, but since Maude Tayler did not realise that cows’ milk in Persia was not as rich as English milk, Doris ‘was half-starved for the first year and never stopped screaming’. Gallingly, her mother later took pleasure in telling her that she was an impossibly difficult baby, and then a tiresome child, quite unlike my brother Harry, who was ...”

“... back of the room, the smell of mimeographed programme notes. It tells an interesting story, but Richard Koszarski told it better, with more critical and historical acumen, in his 1983 study, The Man You Loved to Hate. There are still some unresolved points in the story, however. Stroheim himself was an unreliable narrator. Only after his death in 1957 did ...”