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“... a Wordsworth and Coleridge pilgrimage in Somerset. One of the chief attractions was a rumour that Richard Holmes, currently working on a Life of Coleridge, would appear. For a day and a half there was much talk of Mr Holmes. How would he appear? Over what hill? Across what pond? From time to time messages would arrive which we carefully decoded. Then suddenly ...”

“... There have been​ two recent opportunities to see Richard Mosse’s remarkable work in London. Broken Spectre (2022), a film and series of photographs, was displayed earlier this year in an echoing, pseudo-industrial basement space at 180 the Strand; the Hayward Gallery’s ecologically themed group show Dear Earth, which runs until 3 September, includes the related but more austere multiscreen Grid (Palimi-ú) and photographs taken on the Rio Tigre in the Peruvian Amazon ...”

“... Richard Hamilton, who died on 13 September at the age of 89, invented the idea of Pop art, along with his colleagues in the Independent Group, more than 50 years ago. In ‘Persuading Image’, a lecture he gave in 1959, Hamilton argued, well before it was a commonplace, that consumer society depends on the manufacturing of desire through design, forever updated by the forced obsolescence of style ...”

“... The remarkable literary career of Richard Adams began only eight years ago, but it has already reached substantial dimensions. Watership Down in 1972 was followed by two other works of mystery and imagination, relying more or less heavily on the animal world, and now by The Girl in a Swing, which is ostensibly about human beings ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... up the soil and depositing their dung – kept a rich sward in good condition. The climate may have been drier than at present, if the fossil pollen of the grasses is to be believed, and because so much water was locked up in the ice caps, sea levels were lower. Thus the land bridge of Beringia joined Siberia to Alaska and large mammals could wander ...”

“... In his new book, Richard Bernstein – one of the best reporters at the New York Times – offers some detailed descriptions, and some solid criticisms, of a serious nuisance. Unfortunately, he then tries to inflate this nuisance into a dangerous monster. He offers a lot of useful information about what one segment of the American Left has been doing recently, and his analyses are very acute ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... six kilometres in diameter and split the northern part of the island into three. This eruption may well have fatally weakened Minoan civilisation, thereby diverting the course of European history. The idea for Plato’s vanished island of Atlantis could have derived from this destruction, an idea that seems to be more indestructible than pumice, for even ...”

“... race was always on to find something new and preferably spectacular, and to get the credit for it. Richard Conniff’s entertaining book commemorates this contest, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries. The seekers sought out challenging, unexplored places likely to yield rich taxonomic rewards, notably Amazonia and the Dutch East Indies. Many of ...”

“... rather like the nervous citizens in High Noon when the new film schoolmen come riding into town. Richard Roud is a sensible critic, formerly the Guardian’s film reviewer and now Director of the New York Film Festival. ‘I tend to be wary,’ he says, ‘of systematic criticism and of any form of critical terrorism. And therefore wary of the new kinds of ...”

“... the presiding judge in his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Richard May. He has also, through fierce determination and cross-examination, exposed the fact that the case against him is less solid than it appeared. Command responsibility – the ordering of a crime, or the failure to stop a crime that a commander knows ...”

“... is also meant to be a piece of advocacy. This creates a problem over writing a preface about Richard Long. He has too many admirers. A quarter of a century has passed since he began to gain an international reputation at about the time he left art school, and this reputation has steadily grown upwards and outwards. Mounting stacks of books, catalogues ...”

“... is to see the world from the aspect of eternity, and to achieve the intellectual love of God. As Richard Mason reminds us, Spinoza’s neglect of epistemology made him of little interest to those who insisted that the problem of knowledge as set out by Descartes defined what philosophy was properly about. Spinoza found a little room for that problem only at ...”

“... by modern standards, is the equivalent of Edward Jenner’s first trials of vaccination. In May 1796, he took material from a pustule on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid who had cowpox, and placed that fluid on incisions made in the arm of James Phipps. A later attempt to inoculate Phipps with smallpox failed. The comparison with HIV not as ...”