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“... eloquent and sometimes passionate prose, superbly translated this time by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge. Beyond the biography, Röhl has illuminated the people and structures of the imperial court in dozens of books and essays; his first book, Germany without Bismarck (1967), a pioneering work of archival reconstruction, remains the go-to text for ...”

“... An alternative charge against David Steel stems from the crisis meeting at his home at Ettrick Bridge in the Scottish Lowlands ten days before polling in 1983. In the previous week, as the Alliance campaign seemed to falter, sources close to Steel canvassed support for the idea that he should supplant Roy Jenkins as ...”

“... To the west of the Isle of Dogs, a mile or so towards the City of London, a Victorian bridge spans the entrance canal to the Limehouse Basin. Ten years ago, London’s docklands were still largely derelict, and few vehicles passed that way on a Sunday. So there was no problem for the reporters and television crews who blocked the bridge in the pale sunshine of a winter’s afternoon ...”

“... sciences’ so much as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and the old, but still valid, Humanities of our grandparents. On the whole, Hexter’s positive assessment of this French superiority (for once!) seems to me pertinent, though pleasantly flattering too to my ...”

“... We will not find, on the one hand, poets such as J.H. Prynne and Iain Sinclair, or (apart from Roy Fisher) any of the poets collected in Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville’s 1987 anthology, A Various Art. Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, will we find poets such as Peter Robinson, Robert Wells or Clive Wilmer, or the Carcanet poets from the days when ...”

“... public health service thinks it’s all a scare, but because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since early 1986, when the papers in this (otherwise fascinating) volume were written. It’s crucial to grasp, moreover, that medical politics plays its part in Aids-forecasting as well as in budgeting the NHS. Indeed, political rhetoric wears hardly a ...”

“... installation currently give the Hayward Gallery an of-our-own-time presence. But the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein which line the walls – the early ones anyway – are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz.* The general effect of the show is ...”

“... the city in its dirty yellow light. The authentic Londoner’s lament can be heard throughout Roy Porter’s history of London, which has, in addition, the other great metropolitan quality of cunning built into its very structure. What looks for all the world like yet another coffee-table picture book is in reality fat-full of angry words building to a ...”

“... began to have a reasonable chance of a decent lifespan. The hazards were daunting, however, and Le Roy Ladurie gives a graphic account of them. Thomas had his first narrow squeak as an infant in the Swiss Valais, when he wandered out from the house of the aunts who were raising him into the snow and almost froze to death; still a small child, he was hauled up ...”

“... out of the language by assigning it such narrow, youthful duties? The three quotations are by 1. Roy Fuller, from Souvenirs,1 the first volume of his memoirs. The second, Vamp till ready,2 has recently appeared and its excellence shamed me into tracking down Vol. One. 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 ...”

“... sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.The notion of a Trump literature begins, appropriately, with an imaginary novel, 1999: Casinos of the Third ...”

“... impossible struggle to get to work in the morning after staying up into the wee hours playing bridge and poker at Crockfords. Sometimes he would have to write his father urgent letters asking him to bail him out of his card debts; but more often he won. He was earning £3 a week but sometimes won £100 at a sitting. After he got the sack he became a ...”

“... itself to be explained? One philosophically attractive proposal is the idea that an indisputable bridge linking different forms of words is the truth or falsity of what is said. Truth is what binds the answer ‘Frenchmen eat snails’ to the question ‘Do Frenchmen eat snails?’ in all cases where, as a matter of fact, Frenchmen do eat snails. Truth, it ...”

“... released from jail with a pardon. His rehabilitation is held back by the presence in the area of Roy Sturtevant, who bears a bitter grudge against him, but helped along by the companionship he offers to another young man, Gareth Vaisey, who is more or less catatonic after an accident (involving a horse, a car and a train) that killed his father and two ...”

“... He was no longer the man he had been. Harold Lever is portrayed as a man too devoted to playing bridge with the Establishment – his membership of a Labour Cabinet was increasingly inappropriate. I myself disagreed frequently with Harold’s views on macro-economic policy, though perhaps from a point of view even more distasteful to Barbara. But I know of ...”