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“... dies, he is bitterly grieved for and richly remembered. If the Josephs and Ruths and Lyndas and Richards have no such life to write about, they are indeed bound to stew in their own scalding, curdled juice. Neither their writing nor their characters, however, count for much. It is Nathan’s sensibility that dominates, and what we know of it is in a sense ...”

“... prose is flogged as ‘wilfully loose’ and as a ‘yawp for yawp’s sake’. The critic I.A. Richards is subjected to a sliding studs-up tackle: ‘If I.A. Richards really finds the communication of simple experiences so much more difficult than most people do, this is probably because he avoids defining the terms he ...”

“... of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the body, the brain and so on. Whatever the candidate, fictional narratives might help us to see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends Middlemarch or ...”

“... it, about mountains? Near the end of his long life as a passionate if cautious mountaineer, I.A. Richards told an audience at the Alpine Club that only the ‘moderately sophisticated’ could see the point of what to others looked like a ‘dangerous and wasteful species of dementia’. Only a mind which was in full possession of itself could hold off the ...”

“... Perhaps the critic who saw an allusion to Frazer in The Third Man was guilty of what I.A. Richards called a mnemonic irrelevance, but the arboreal and social connotations of the pair Holly-Lime cannot simply be brushed aside. Symbolism can use the novelist as much as the novelist uses symbolism. The writer tends to feel just as equivocal about lay ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... wars, in opposition to its historical inheritance. The faculty’s polemical heavyweights, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, had both given up an undergraduate history degree and taken against the subject. Richards recalled that he ‘couldn’t bear history’ and ‘didn’t think history ought to have happened’. Around ...”

“... Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by ...”

“... occasion for the encounter. Donoghue rejects the ‘communication’ models of Jakobson or Richards, with their idea of message or signal passing from ‘addresser’ to ‘addressee’ or ‘source’ to ‘destination’, and offers instead a model based on the traditional image of ‘conversation’. This ‘conversation’ is a play of uncompleted ...”

“... fires up and down my spine. This was a radical idea at the time: it wasn’t until 2007 that Keith Richards told an interviewer he’d snorted cocaine mixed with his father’s ashes. Lipsyte’s first novel, The Subject Steve, was published on 11 September 2001, an inauspicious start even if your subject matter is the lives of fatalistic losers. The book ...”

“... title and also by letting the first and last words in the book come from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and those on the jacket from Paul McCartney, so that Fraser is effectively handed over to showbiz. In reality, showbiz was in the margin of his life. He was a creative figure in the art world whose motivation for dealing was neither profit nor fame but a ...”

“... bunch above the arch of the foot, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this new purpose.’ I.A. Richards loved to climb with his wife Dorothy Pilley and both wrote eloquently about it: in a Borrowdale climbing hut the other day I found the handwritten note of what may have been their last mountain walk in England, in the same logbook as my eldest son’s ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... the preferred word for capitalism – but also against “popular taste” and what Richards, in those early days, called “the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker”. Actual history became, as in both F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, a kind of cultural history which traced the long fall and ratified the new minority.’ But ...”