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“... or in arguing?’ ‘Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?’ He explains his choice of title by saying that he wants to substitute ‘explanations’ for ‘proofs’. An explanation, he tells us, answers the question: ‘How is one thing possible, given certain other ...”

“... Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer ...”

“... essential is to make an effort to know as much about them as they seem to know about us. It is nice to be able to report that the pioneers of this scholarly approach to Japan were, by and large, British: Chamberlain, Aston, Satow, followed by Murdoch, Waley and Sansom. It is not so pleasant to report that the initiative is now almost entirely in ...”

“... By far the most striking image of Richard II is the one found in the great portrait of him, crowned and enthroned, which still survives in Westminster Abbey. Painted in the 1390s, when the king was in his twenties, it gives him a slightly boyish, even feminine appearance, with red cheeks, full lips and a small goatee beard ...”

“... around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese went into overdrive. The guy stopped, put on his shades, sucked in his cheeks, they went bam, bam, bam, and he walked on. The Warholian timeframe had shrunk to 15 seconds. Everybody interviews everybody. ‘What are all these ...”

“... The first picture in Richard Avedon’s folio is captioned ‘Alan Silvey, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada’. Such photographs were taken in the Dustbowl fifty years ago. But this is art, not documentation. We have learned a lot about photography since the Thirties, and now no one believes that truth is simple – ‘all photographs are accurate ...”

“... enter into the phenomenon of Peterley Harvest, a novel composed by the librarian and bibliographer Richard Pennington and offered to the world by him and his first publisher – in what spirit it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and ...”

“... it was how flat the characters seemed: ‘a slender woman in a dark coat and hat’, ‘a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so’ etc. Even the protagonists are feebly realised and hard to tell apart or remember, as if in a film script waiting to be fleshed out by actors. Their dialogue is fast and natural, but has little of Chandler’s ...”

“... a story with a strong mixture of ingredients: sex, friendships, betrayals, glam connections, nice locations, eccentric personalities, the odd suicide, a touch of politics, more sex ... Functioning as a haut-bourgeois soap, it affords a nice cue for moralising – ‘he shouldn’t have done that’; ‘she should have ...”

“... in you will be made more interested by the painting. Other pictures here are more like reportage: Richard Hamilton’s worked up photograph of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (1968), handcuffed and covering their faces after being arrested for possessing drugs, derives from a news picture. But it was also personal – Fraser was Hamilton’s dealer at the time ...”

“... it in many fashionable diets – how fibre affects digestion and even what it actually is. It is nice to learn that the Maya and Aztec anticipated modern science by discovering empirically that, before being eaten, maize needs to be processed with an alkaline substance, such as ashes or lime: if consumed untreated, as it was when first introduced to ...”

“... and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being focused and ...”

“... a bit thin, although the assurance with which the trick is carried off in Cuyp’s pictures, the nice calculation of tone and the sure movements of the brush are always performances worth one’s attention. The English in particular came to love him; in the 18th and 19th centuries collecting Cuyp was so much an English thing that most of his paintings which ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... 2007 book, another into flickering memory for this one. On both Hanley is accompanied by some very nice men. I’d love to meet her mate Richard, first introduced in Estates. At Solihull College they were ‘the much-talked-about, little practised coming together of north Solihull and south Solihull, a clash of the ...”