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“... present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of ...”

“... professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... These palaces were essentially status symbols. Italy was becoming a land of façades. Professor Richard Trexler, another old Florentine hand, is interested in another kind of façade. His long-awaited book is a study of ritual and formal behaviour in Florence from the 14th century to the end of the last Republic in 1530. Historical studies of ritual have ...”

“... William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east Scotland. All three produced work that strikes me as special – as important, if you like – because ...”

“... their declarations, much hotter. Another of the new voices, in this collection of essays, that of Richard Scher, is raised to point out that over-ambitious manipulation and political ruthlessness by the Moderates in 1762 produced a reaction uniting, for a while, the middling and lower orders of Edinburgh. Indeed occasionally in the 1760s there can be heard a ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... as shopping rather than weekend outings. It even became an icon of the counterculture, with John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive selling more than two million copies. Muir encouraged readers to ‘feel with your car’; its ‘karma’, he wrote, ‘depends on your desire to make it and keep it – ALIVE’. The ...”

“... portrait composed of largely asserted values illuminating and convincing: disappointingly, in Richard Schacht’s introduction such an enquiry, which would indeed be timely, is not attempted. The last essay, ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’, is designed as an apotheosis of the Master on the occasion of the first Bayreuth Festival of July 1876. ‘In ...”

“... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...”

“... of a theory to be found readily enough, in several forms, as in Stevens, Empson, Blackmur, and Richard Poirier. Poirier’s A World Elsewhere is a typology of American literature consistent with the acceptance of Emerson as its prophet. Empson didn’t write a theory of American literature, but he thought James’s later style distinctively American in ...”

“... example, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 from the savagery of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel Coward to Isaiah Berlin have been inflated to fill up gaps. It is the greatest of Douglas’s posthumous misfortunes that his brilliant inward-looking talents, so suited to a time obsessed by inward ...”

“... the same time – often to dramatic effect; but also a series of stunning temporary exhibitions (Richard III, Samuel Pepys, Cecil Beaton’s photographs) which had ‘the whole of London agog’ and queues of people round Trafalgar Square. These ‘Diaries’ – in fact, partly reworked versions of a variety of ‘jottings’ and more crafted ...”

“... but none in a way that is easy to interpret. Perhaps the very act of bombing from a plane – what Richard Eberhart called ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, the gap between, in J.M. Synge’s phrase, ‘a gallous story and a dirty deed’ – made it impossible for anyone, including Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem which seems to ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”