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“... to challenge what he sees as Creationist nonsense. A group of local fundamentalists, led by one Allen Roberts, claimed to have found ‘scientific’ evidence of the remains of Noah’s Ark. Plimer counter-claimed that this alleged evidence is a natural geological structure, a syncline, located about 20 miles from Mount Ararat in Turkey – not far as the ...”

“... While writing World of Secrets, Walter Laqueur had discussions with the present and all surviving past directors of the Central Intelligence Agency save one, as well as with other senior Intelligence official and their main customers. Such goings-on would be unthinkable, or at the very least unavowable, in Britain ...”

“... memories of old gallantries downtrodden. From Warren at his best, as from Faulkner, and the Allen Tate of The Fathers, we expect the former. The blurb from which I quoted arouses apprehensions of the latter. Warren’s latest book falls somewhere in between, alas tilting somewhat to the blurb. We begin with memories of the author’s ...”

“... we may feel, cannot be far from the Epiphany. And, in fact, for some decades now (from Walter Allen to David Lodge) critics have found it worth while to see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ in terms of the new movement of Modernism. Certainly it does no harm to recall that Kipling’s story was written nearly two decades before the so much more apparently ...”

“... While such authority was granted to a number of English clerics, including Father William Allen, who in 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant authorities alike was that men faced damnation in dissembling their ...”

“... this piece of oral history has been turned by skilful editing into an immensely readable memoir. Walter Gregory’s tale is in many ways archetypal. ‘Setting off for Spain ... I was like a holidaymaker going abroad for the first time.’ He had moved through trade-union activism inexorably leftward via the Hunger Marches into the Communist Party – the ...”

“... he warned, but those who ‘accept Erasmus as a guide will not wander far out of the way’. P.S. Allen’s edition of the Letters, and Toronto’s elegant translation of them, makes that true still. Events unroll, week by week, without the perversions of hindsight. Erasmus shows himself a good judge of character. In the 1530s many in France and England came ...”

“... there, and staying, for a short while at least, in an unemployed miner’s house. His friend Allen Hutt later wrote of this as a turning point in Jennings’s life: his upbringing had instilled in him a Ruskinian obsession with the impact of mechanisation on work and on ways of thinking, but he now encountered at first hand ‘the land of industry, of ...”

“... without frames, and Rauschenberg often photographed them among everyday things. As the curator Walter Hopps commented, they also underscore ‘the fact of a new urban surface’. Nevertheless, the two series do share an essential operation in negation. After two White Paintings were exhibited in September 1953, Cage offered this litany: ‘No subject/No ...”

“... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...”

“... subtly shifting chapter devoted to a particular pairing of characters: Owen, who is blackmailing Allen, whose daughter Priscilla has an affair with Walter, who is the mentor of Phoebe, who forges a portrait of Elizabeth, who everyone loves. One of his quieter books is Twenty Lines a Day (1988), the result of his decision ...”

“... not expect them to provide us with an ‘equivalent of’ their source. We should instead – as Walter Benjamin proposed in his visionary essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ – ask how the imaginative life of the source text has been prolonged, what has been done by the translation, what it points to, throws light on, or mimes. Take the first of two ...”

“... no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.’ It’s easy to see why unsteady, disappointed people would be attracted to such a figure, but ...”

“... greatest hits loosely tied together with obiter dicta. In writing about Edgar Johnson’s Life of Walter Scott, for instance, in the New Yorker in 1971, he assembled a sequence of favoured exhibits. ‘Idiosyncrasies are always endearing, and Scott was not without them’; examples follow. Then, further down the same page: ‘The working habits of a writer ...”

“... in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his ...”