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“... notorious December 2022 interview with the far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was that Hitler ‘invented the very microphone I use as a musician’. Well, no, obviously. But it is true both that Hitler’s reliance on the distinctively tubular Neumann CMV3 when speaking at rallies and other public events earned it the nickname the ...”

“... is scarcely borne out by the social identity of its leaders – some of whom, notably O’Connor, Jones and O’Brien, were indisputably middle-class, whilst others like Hetherington, Harney and Lovett became so by a process of upward social mobility. Mrs Thompson claims that ‘the genuinely middle-class Chartists were very few in number’, but she nowhere ...”

“... of this chicken.’ In another shed, I watched an aquacade about the sinking of Atlantis starring Ralph the Pig. After two students in togas talked about the wrath of the volcano god, Ralph, a large but shapely pig, emerged nude and dived gracefully into the lagoon. Over dinner with the English department that evening (hush ...”

“... his merry men’. This irony misfires. We see the photographs in this book of Kon Fredericks and Ralph Cooper (the plumber Sir Peter tried so hard to sack) and we think of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck; we cast their boss as the Sheriff of Nottingham, frustrated by merry men. Sir Peter’s diary shows him trying to persuade softer members of the staff to join ...”

“... the British and Kenyan governments. The story has now been made into a film by Fernando Meirelles. Ralph Fiennes stars as Justin Quayle, a modest functionary at the British High Commission in Nairobi, whose young wife, Tessa, played by Rachel Weisz, is an embarrassment to the authorities and a heroine in Kibera, a shantytown of approximately a million ...”

“... picaresque fable that follows Travis’s fortunes as he rises from humble coffee salesman to PA to Ralph Richardson’s millionaire businessman, only to be scapegoated by his boss and sent to prison for fraud; from there he emerges a would-be social reformer, and is ripped off, ignored and finally beaten up by the poor he tries to help; he ends up auditioning ...”

“... now teaching at the University of Minnesota and the couple spend a holiday in California, visiting Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife, Jane, wealthy idealists seeking to set up a utopian community. The dialogue here strikes a number of false notes, with ‘trial’ used as a verb (a piece of organisational jargon not cited by the OED before 1981) and an ...”

“... was just one among several writerly modes. Two years after her death, her former associate James Ralph wrote The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated, a landmark treatise about literary property and professional authorship in the post-patronage marketplace. If Haywood is exemplary of anything now, it’s not dashed-off erotica with a life to ...”

“... Kathleen Glynn, who has produced all his films. Next came his disastrous editorship of Mother Jones, the muckraking San Francisco magazine, from which he was fired after five months (Moore says that there was a disagreement about how to cover the Sandinistas, but it seems that Moore had also alienated most of the staff and consistently failed to meet ...”

“... of all discussion, was inculcated by 19th-century Orientalists: the translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the ‘Shakespeare of the East’. To do this, Jones had to reverse history – Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. ...”

“... found a utopian slogan for it: ‘Under the pavement, the beach.’ ‘But this is inaccurate,’ Ralph Miliband reflected eight years later. ‘Under the pavement, there are the sewers.’ The Labour Party spent four and a half years looking for a beach under the street. Now they are in the sewers. In April, a leaked report into the handling of complaints ...”

“... with a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson. Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life he went to a luxurious health farm – his favoured establishment was Champneys – to lose a few pounds. The ...”

“... if someone in the IRA had read The Ultimate and taken the idea from there. Two other thrillers, Ralph (1982) and The Baring Fault (1986), published under his own name, dealt with a tricky topic for Stonehouse: both are stories about British politicians spying for the Soviet bloc, one of them initially compromised by a honeytrap. After his early release ...”

“... black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been ...”

“... as she did so from the pleasant, vacuous life of a society matron of means. But Edith Newshold Jones did have to become the society matron first. And her marriage to Teddy Wharton might be thought of as dictated by chance. As Benstock makes clear, she had reached the point when she had to marry somebody when she got engaged in 1885: ‘At 23, her 1879 ...”