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“... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...”

“... admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that would have cost the Conservative donor an estimated £45 million. A few weeks earlier, Desmond, the former owner of the Express newspapers, had ...”

“... politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise. Whatever might come of it in France, the French Revolution had ‘revealed in human nature … a capacity for improvement that no politician could have conjured up’ and, according to ...”

“... and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local politics as an independent. She would have chaired the 2017 meeting that rubber-stamped the start of housebuilding on the ...”

“... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...”

“... for London’s waste. There isn’t much romance in an ordinary boat being rammed, sinking like a stone – with no time for heroism or cowardice or stories of any sort – and leaving survivors bobbing for a few minutes in shit. The Titanic and her sister ships, on the other hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster ...”

“... Duse ‘almost concealed’ it: ‘She takes her great anguish and lays it in a tomb and rolls a stone before the door.’ Cather gravitated towards Duse, Acocella suggests, because the Italian actress’s understated style came closest to expressing Cather’s own evolving impulse as a novelist: to convey meaning subtly, through oblique hints and ...”

“... could shift the frontier of oil exhaustion decisively. Sheikh Yamani is fond of saying that ‘the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone’: the Oil Age will come to an end long before the world runs out of oil. It is untenable, then, to suggest that absolute scarcity propelled the events of 2003. Price didn’t have much ...”

“... up as Bimbo (as in the clown by Walt Disney). However, let him who is without typos cast the first stone. Even the honourable and impeccable Samuels perpetrated the occasional stinker, and lest the above be taken for a pasting, let it be said that Meryle Secrest has written an entertaining, readable, often very perceptive biography which by no stretch of the ...”

“... evidence linking him to war crimes. Despite the advanced state of the German prosecution, Richard Goldstone, who had recently been given leave from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to head the Prosecutor’s office in The Hague, was determined that the Tribunal should not let the only current case of an alleged war criminal pass ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... Monroe. Like so many young London literati of the period – Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint – Eliot fell under the spell of Pound’s beguiling mixture of flamboyance, generosity and startling self-confidence. Together they orchestrated what in hindsight can seem like a hostile takeover of the somewhat moribund London ...”

“... by such as Julian Huxley and Joseph Needham. They had not lasted. The writer just quoted is Richard Hoggart, whose memories of his time in Paris are not fond. The picture he paints of a Unesco General Conference – the kind taking place through the door just to the left of Picasso’s mural – seems relevant. Meetings usually start late. There is no ...”

“... wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while Turner’s near contemporary Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ...”