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“... sweeping along any number of clichés, truisms and allusions in its wake, as when describing Richard Burton in Rich (1988): ‘He was driven by a devil that he never knew but he never stopped fighting, a maker of his own myths, Celtic, Faustian, an Icarus and a Don Juan, coming out from his beloved Wales like a mystical warrior to rove the world for ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... ballad-mongers and historians combined to give him his unsupported date in the time of King Richard’s exile, his wholly bogus aristocratic status as a dispossessed heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, and, somewhat incongruously, a greatly enlarged corpus of unashamedly plebeian opponents with an ever-increasing tendency to improve on the potter’s ...”

“... the city, wheeling her around to focus on unexpected views and details: ‘the texture of old stone, a batch of secondhand bathtubs for sale on a sidewalk, the juxtaposition of several buildings’. Though often thought of as a social critic (because of his collaboration with James Agee in 1941 on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Evans, too, distrusted ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... small birds who pick meat from a crocodile’s teeth. He has chased Ackroyd, dogged him, as the stone-throwing ‘Deputy’ worries Stony Durdles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Across the badlands of literary biography, from Eliot to Dickens. A parodic and jeering sidebar to Ackroyd’s monumental heritage project. ‘Tombatism’, Durdles’s coinage, part ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”

“... however, it may well be the result of a consciously chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ...”

“... of us might have done what he did, but your father had that ball-player’s arm.’ Francis’s stone ‘flew out of his fist like a bullet and caught the scab driver on the head ... The cops didn’t care about catching your father, of course. They were all with the strikers. But the Traction Company bosses forced them into a manhunt, and so we all knew ...”

“... Yet one has to admire his thoroughness. In the search for gendering toads Sams leaves no stone unturned, and he’s only shallow when it suits him. What he says of other Shakespeareans, in drumming decasyllabons, seems apt: The doubts do not derive from any dearth Of data, which are dauntingly copious. What is missing is a methodology. And ...”

“... Humphreys read hundreds of inscriptions, contemplated the scenes represented on pottery and stone tomb monuments, painstakingly reconstructed family trees, and analysed the patterns of burial in a number of different sites. She found that nuclear families tended to be buried together, and that starting in the fifth century both the monuments and ...”

“... the work. This halt in the narrative of Priestley’s remarkable career invites comparison with Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, which stopped just as his protagonist set sail in spring 1804 for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of ...”

“... BBC had created (Ted Ray, Billy Cotton and his band, the gramophone record-presenter Christopher Stone), and not only set them off to better advantage but did so in pre-recorded, packaged series that were much more profitable for the performer. In an early demonstration of the dread art of scheduling, the commercial stations also concentrated their forces on ...”

“... for your dinner. Let her get everything ready to make you happy and then see the look on your stone face when you come in at night and sit down at the table. A surprise for dinner? Oh, my girl, that is merely his due for a miserable day of bad writing. Z/R’s seriousness about the art of writing, and his reverence for writers, including himself, is one ...”