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“... I have always thought of Richard Wollheim as embodying the values and interests of a particularly urbane kind of British intellectual, typified by and possibly originating with the members of the Bloomsbury Circle. It encompasses a serious interest in the arts and especially the art of painting; a dedication to some version of socialist politics; a faith in psychoanalysis as therapy and as a theory of the mind; a commitment to articulate an aesthetic philosophy and in some measure to attempt to live by it; a determination to enhance one’s prose with a certain literary surface; and a profound concern for friendship and the life of the heart ...”

“... the proctors to be intolerably rude to God. There was a legendary mock-funeral in King’s Parade. Richard Wollheim, who was at Oxford, approaches Boxer slowly by way of de Hoghton, the rich fat poet, maintaining, rather against the evidence adduced, that de Hoghton was interesting and talented. He is said to have got his poem into Granta behind Boxer’s ...”

“... Reading Richard Wollheim’s study of what it is to live the life of a person was a frustrating, painful experience. Perhaps it can best be summarised by saying that while the book goes to great lengths to ensure precision in the second decimal, it leaves us in the dark about the first. Wollheim has a marvellously knowledgeable and intelligent mind ...”

“... or dismissive, so some venerable commentators – the late Lawrence Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence ...”

“... the man and his work (of which far and away the most valuable in the context of the exhibition is Richard Wollheim’s note on the pictures painted in the last year of his life), an excellent biographical and bibliographical chronology, and one long paragraph and three short ones by Adrian himself on his painting – from two pieces written in the ...”

“... There is perhaps no better guide to the dauntingly complex issues involved in these questions than Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects. First published over twelve years ago, this concise, elegant and wide-ranging book has established itself as an indispensable text for undergraduate courses in aesthetics. The second edition leaves the original text ...”

“... to a tourist: ‘Here’s ancient Rome.’ Both artists are humorists as well as death-haunted. (Richard Wollheim once said to me, apropos The Triumph of Pan, which is in the exhibition, that he did not feel Poussin ever managed the difficult business of laughter in paint. Maybe not: but he was good at showing human beings trying to be funny. He was ...”

“... is social, not scholarly. Not that these categories can confidently be thought distinct. When Richard Wollheim and I agreed to do a double act at a lunchtime university seminar we were surprised to find that a very large number of people had turned up with their sandwiches: but they hadn’t come just for the company, and there were plenty of acute ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to ...”

“... has a polemical purpose that draws, at least indirectly, on Morelli’s experience of revolution. Richard Wollheim argued that it was an attack on the provincialism that stood in the way of unification. ‘As long as every city felt itself to be the cradle of a school of art,’ he wrote, ‘as long as it believed that it contained in its own gallery its ...”

“... who were later to denounce it as obscene. Football is itself violent, of course – my friend Richard Wollheim once broke it to me that he was unable to look at a game, for this reason. But it has always distinguished between an allowable and an alien violence, and the rules it has for that purpose generally work. None of the really outstanding ...”

“... to have been the co-respondent when Ayer divorced his first wife. Three years later he recruited Richard Wollheim from Oxford, but thereafter he appointed his own students. Since he was a fine teacher this proved a better idea than might ordinarily be thought. He had a department of varied talents and no orthodoxy except an un-Oxfordian devotion to ...”

“... is laid on his stomach). Since editors so assiduous fail to notice this, we can infer that little Wollheim and little Hopkins must have had similar difficulties – ‘we’ who ‘know how to use psychoanalytic theory’, that is. Finally, even if Freud had had good reason for thinking that the Rat Man had never been sexually intimidated, Freud’s falling ...”

“... tradition of directly translating subjective impressions into economic terms’. Even Richard Wollheim, who rarely rises above an abject appreciativeness in his dealings with Freud, concedes that Freud ‘sometimes treated propositions about energy and its liberation as though they were descriptions of introspectible phenomena’. This ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”