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“... he could. Many men and women there who despised the regime made bargains with themselves: if the price of getting a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a certain Major Kowalski now and then and invent some harmless platitudes – cheap at that price. A few of my friends ...”

“... Velazquez as a Stoic painter, practising the virtues of restraint and discretion they recommended. Richard Mann’s study of El Greco’s patrons is highly appropriate to a new series of monographs on art history of which the editors are Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny. It is the author’s first book, a revised version of a doctoral thesis supervised by ...”

“... for the great poems that emerged from it? The editing of these letters, under the careful eyes of Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, is as superbly well done as it was in the first volume. This is not to say that the letters are great letters. Alas, no. The expense of reticence is boringness, and if you want literary gossip you’ll still have to go to ...”

“... and Humboldt. Immense successes were achieved, but by the Seventies it was clear that a heavy price had been paid for them. Much German scholarship had become dry and ponderous, as the young Nietzsche pointed out: but this charge could not be levelled against the greatest scholars, like Mommsen and Wilamowitz, and German Classical scholarship continued to ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a fiction. The Victorians who came after him would never have permitted anything like ...”

“... of the earliest letters, written when Gabriel was seven, records his ‘reading Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd for my amusement . . . I, Maria, and William know several scenes by heart. I have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”

“... in challenging the limits of existing technology. In 1959, long before he had won his Nobel Prize, Richard Feynman encouraged people to think small by offering a couple of prizes of his own: $1000 dollars for an electric motor which would fit into a cube with 1/64 of an inch sides, and another $1000 for a page of text 1/250,000th of its normal size, in a form ...”

“... of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds.’ But no price was too high to pay. If the marriage was necessarily sterile, at least the books had been born. All Una’s emotional capital was invested in John’s genius. Michael Baker doesn’t claim to be a critic and therefore makes no attempt to decide whether her ...”

“... was the scion of a landowning family. He records much about the quality of local produce and the price of crops. At times he almost resembles Cobbett in his attention to such details, though he lacks the radical sympathies of the author of Rural Rides. When visiting Derbyshire in the summer of 1801, he encounters factory children returning from work in ...”

“... name. The bookseller scrutinised the inscription and sold me the book at the slightly inflated price of 100 Egyptian pounds (around £9). Sitting on the bus afterwards, I began to think about that dedication. The words ‘with admiration’ stuck out. It seemed an odd phrase for Nkrumah to have used. Could it be the Muhammad (or, as Nkrumah spelled ...”

“... entered the language and persisted even when Skelt’s, the biggest manufacturers, halved the price. It’s the title of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay in Memories and Portraits, in which he recalls his generation’s passion for toy theatres; the wait to save up for a new play and the agony of choosing just one from the stationer’s shop in ...”