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“... situations, and a stylistic decorum verging on self-parody. No one is ‘discreetly wealthy’ in Ronald Frame’s snappy Underwood and Alter: their wealth is as indiscreet as the narrator’s fascination with it. Ralph Witton lives in a collector’s world of oriental carpets, sports cars and celebrities, with bit-parts (circa 1957) for the Windsors and ...”

“... is not an allegorical representation of 20th-century Europe. C.K. Stead’s Sister Hollywood and Ronald Frame’s Penelope’s Hat both represent a certain mid-point between egotistical and self-annihilating narrative. Stead’s novel is written in two different voices: much the more interesting is the one which is further from his own. Bill Harper, the ...”

“... sketches, views of Hollywood, facsimiles of memoranda and old newspapers, publicity stills and frame enlargements, pages of shots from David Selznick films. All it lacks is a disc in the binding with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. And yet, despite the hype, the book repays the muscular effort of reading it. (Stonemasons’ Weekly: ‘I found this book hard to ...”

“... First the bad news. They have printed the Mgr Ronald Knox limerick as above. I am not going to look at the Baring-Gould book to see if the mistake was primarily his. But surely the proper Knox version made sense, and went something like Evangelical vicar in want Of a second-hand portable font,   Would exchange for the same   A portrait (in frame) Of the Bishop-Elect of Vermont ...”

“... had stood. A detail noticed, with affectionate forensic eye, in the bedroom of the house in which Ronald Walter Kötting died in 2000. Father’s heart was bad, he spent time in hospital – and then, with no hope of recovery, he came home to wait. Andrew Kötting undertook a sequence of black and white photographs of the body (death-bearded, eyes ...”

“... his impassive lizard-like countenance. The President’s body sat there, not at all like a human frame reposing in the moments before public oratory, but as Reagan-at-rest extruding not a tincture of emotion until impelled by some unseen spasm of synapses into Reagan-amused, the briefest of smiles soon being dismissed in favour of the sombre passivity one ...”

“... thought on minute particulars, and even if this is less clear than it might be from the plates in Ronald Lightbown’s massive monograph, Lightbown himself has a very keen eye for the subordinate, often tiny things which the artist painted so well, and has industriously inquired into what exactly they were, and also into what they meant. There is, for ...”

“... tangled over his nose, his front teeth had a gap wide enough to stick a straw in, and his starved frame looked even bonier in suits handed down by his uncles. By the time he left the Birmingham Rep for London, he had transformed himself. Photographs of the early Thirties show a glossy young matinee idol with plucked eyebrows, romantic cheekbones, flawless ...”

“... It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is that he has such peculiar ones.’ He was referring to what has been officially termed the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) but what is much more appropriately called Star Wars ...”

“... so proud and which marked her out as a professional woman, ‘Have I the pleasure of serving Mr Ronald Colman?’Whereupon Mr Ronald Colman (and God forgive him) looks most put out, says ‘No,’ and strides out into Commercial Street. Of course had Aunty had more sense she would have waited until she had his shoe ...”

“... you are at the prow of a ship on a voyage that follows the sun across the ocean. It depends on the frame of mind that you bring to the zawns and the headlands and the moors. Near the start of Rising Ground Marsden brings back to life a mason called Daniel Gumb who lived early in the 18th century, with his wife and family, in a hut built of granite near the ...”

“... to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a ...”

“... they feel the answer to their questions is out of reach rather than non-existent; just beyond the frame, or leaving the school courtyard as you give a faint wave of your hand. What all this suggests is what we already know from many other sources: that the war and the Occupation, collaboration and Vichy, provided France with its most needy and demanding ...”

“... a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s ‘justice for hedgehogs’ in Dworkin’s book of 2011 with that title, although Miller does say in a footnote that he disagrees with him. He has in his sights the ‘neo-Augustinians’, as he calls them, like the late G.A. Cohen, for whom ...”

“... Latin. Toynbee was not as good at this as his father-in-law Gilbert Murray or his own contemporary Ronald Knox: but he was good enough to win a Balliol scholarship, which he followed up with First Classes in both Mods and Greats and a Balliol Fellowship in Ancient History. Saved by an opportune attack of dysentery from the holocaust of the First World War, he ...”