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“... Hugh Kearney has written a book to assert the reality of the British Isles as an intercommunicating group of cultures with many features in common but also with strong regional or national differences. It is a timely reminder that the political dominance of these islands by England from the 17th century covers only a small part of their various histories ...”

“... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...”

“... Sixties, after influencing virtually every major figure in anthropology from Malinowski to Audrey Richards. Roland Oliver, who in the Fifties pioneered the serious study of African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has recently identified diffusionism as the biggest intellectual obstacle to be overcome in winning recognition for the new ...”

“... a compliment. It was that other place, inhabited by bolshie ideologues like Leavis, Empson, I.A. Richards and Raymond Williams, which set the pace as far as concepts and critical procedures were concerned, and which engaged in such superfluous pursuits as reflecting on why one was studying literature in the first place. Oxford people just read the books and ...”

“... though an opening chapter on ‘The Good Reader’ gives more space than one might expect to I.A. Richards and Bonamy Dobrée, with their assumptions about informed reading and fixed meaning. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Harold Bloom’s map of misreading and Stanley Fish’s interpretive communities all get ...”

“... the intellectual. But he is also one of the few working American novelists – along with Paul Beatty, Lydia Millet, Mark Leyner, Mark Doten – truly committed to satire. The opening passage of The Ask compares America to a ‘run-down and demented pimp’ slumped in the corner of a pool hall, a novel image of imperial decline. Sometimes it’s the ...”

“... form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning off-handedness, it was perfectly capable of saving us. It was no accident that this exalted vision of art grew stronger with the advent of industrial capitalism. The artwork was the enemy of industrial production because it was an ...”

“... title and also by letting the first and last words in the book come from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and those on the jacket from Paul McCartney, so that Fraser is effectively handed over to showbiz. In reality, showbiz was in the margin of his life. He was a creative figure in the art world whose motivation for ...”

“... bat’ and ‘First Love’. He liked best the addictive serials of the Thirties written by Frank Richards for the Magnet and the Gem, with the characters neatly divided into two gangs easily distinguished by their appearance. There were curly-haired, pretty-mouthed cricketers, Bob Cherry and Tom Merry (Simon Raven’s favourite), and the manly, righteous ...”

“... crude rhetoric and subtle drama.’ Hardy’s extended discussions of the deaths of Nell and Paul Dombey are every bit as intelligent as Stewart’s, and designed to make a quite opposite point about troughs and peaks in Dickensian artistry. The terms ‘form’ and ‘feeling’ have been refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her ...”

“... is worth nothing if it doesn’t cost too much. When he discovered that his theologian friend Paul Elmer More didn’t believe in hell, he was indignant and wrote: ‘Is your God some kind of Santa Claus?’ This morality literally erupts in two letters in the volume, producing moments of shock amid an otherwise totally absorbing (perhaps I mean ...”

“... but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still young in ...”

“... theatrical in character, not to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the ...”

“... Dombey employs Polly Toodle as a wet-nurse for his motherless baby. Polly Toodle must be called ‘Richards’ to get rid of the ridiculous low-class appellation, and to separate her from her family. Mr Dombey is very anxious to treat their agreement as ‘a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting’, and is determined to keep the nurse and his ...”

“... the Rolling Stones had conceived as a homage to Redding and the Stax studio sound; Keith Richards later called the Stones’ version ‘a demo for Otis’). Slow, pleading ballads like ‘These Arms of Mine’, ‘Chained and Bound’, ‘My Lover’s Prayer’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ and ‘Pain in My Heart’ may have been his bread ...”