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“... words heave weights into the air. The tension has its roots in his intellectual education and, as Richard Read demonstrates in Art and Its Discontents, the books record a young writer gradually turning from the late-Victorian Hegelianism of his Oxford education towards the 20th-century aperçus of psychoanalysis. Stokes addresses his central concern one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is panic-stricken at another fiendish crime a fourth victim of the maniac The text read: London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half-beast, half-man – is at large . . . The ghoul-like creature, who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with ...”

“... long before you died.                  Words you’ll never read         Are good for nothing but to spread Your greater love of craft in word and deed A gift to make your friends’ desires succeed         While inwardly with pain you bled              To keep your own pride ...”

“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Longford having taken it upon himself to set in train a sequence of events designed to process Richard Milhous Nixon through redemption to beatification and ultimately, I suppose, to canonisation, it is essential that his persecutors must first be made to see him as a martyr and recant the error of their own ways in failing to appreciate the blessedness of ...”

“... walk. His look of quizzical apprehension changed to an amiable apology when I explained I was the Richard Shone to whom he had sent a note a few days earlier asking me to ‘drop in’. ‘Yes, of course you are,’ he said. The note had been prompted by Nancy Ackerley, a friend of mine and the sister of Forster’s great friend J.R. Ackerley, who had written ...”

“... of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t ...”

“... from their frozen obscurity and brought back to life, once more to browse the Arctic plains? Richard Stone assumes that attempts to revive mammoths are a practical possibility. Frozen mammoth sperm, so the theory goes, may yet be viable. Techniques are already used routinely in fertility treatment that allow defrosted sperm to fertilise living eggs, so ...”

“... volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as ...”

“... a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was also a pedagogue, urging his children to read the classics and encouraging David, plump and studious, to write analyses of them – the germ of future ‘treatments’? By 14, the boy was already reporting for father on the work of assorted film-makers (‘Tourneur is one of America’s greatest film ...”

“... cast of mind saw it as a visitation on the sinful. Catastrophe is perversely attractive. As I read the statistics spewed out like pahoehoe lava in this book, it occurred to me that we may be drawn to these disturbances as instances of Armageddon. It is, after all, hellfire itself that bubbles up from magma chambers, destroying everything it touches. The ...”

“... the strong green of the Penguin Crime paperback. The novel was probably twenty years old when I read it, fifty years or so ago – it was first published in 1951, when Tey was in her mid-fifties. A twenty-year-old book can still feel contemporary, but seventy years old in book-time is ancient history. The Daughter of Time has never been out of print, and ...”