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“... cruelty than with simple sex, an interest they appear to be superseding. Around the same time we read of allegations that the Greek police had been inflicting some form of bastinado on a British woman prisoner. They were said to use this means of persuasion as a matter of course. I suppose that we must remind ourselves of the fact that we live in an age of ...”

“... Joyce had built on the groundbass of Homer, so he chose the Aeneid, and called his hero Sergeant Richard Ennis, the name based on Virgil’s hero, the rank on that of J.B. Wilson. (Much later an American researcher pointed out to him that ‘R. Ennis’ was ‘sinner’ spelt backwards, and Burgess is willing to admit that novels may be ‘about’ matters ...”

“... of shorthand for much the film isn’t saying, perhaps can’t say. Roma was eloquently berated by Richard Brody in the New Yorker for not telling us enough about its time and place, and above all for not giving its heroine a voice, just submitting her to series of unexplained actions. Brody is right if we think Cuarón is trying to be De Sica or Rossellini ...”

“... as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s ...”

“... connected with an Edinburgh publication, the Mankind Quarterly. Lane is particularly useful on Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster, who is cited 24 times in the book, but whose research will strike many readers as questionable. The authors maintain that there is an accurate unitary measure of general intelligence, named g, first isolated ...”

“... cells, ant colonies, telephone systems, supermarket chains, television and religion. As his hero, Richard Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s ...”

“... novel, not a puzzle, and the reviewer need not be too shy of revealing the plot. The martyr, Richard Alderman, is a dull, decent father, an insurance man with two sons, a wife and a chic, youthful mother-in-law, more classy than himself. (I visualise them as something like the families in Rebel Without a Cause.) ...”

“... lack of interest in translations of her work. These have mostly been undertaken by her husband, Richard Philcox, with a sometimes heavy hand; she doesn’t read them.) Her novels of that decade – Tree of Life and The Last of the African Kings, for instance – range around the African diaspora. Her restlessness is a ...”

“... are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age demonstrates another, and less indirect, approach to the emotional texture of the past: the difficult excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people’s lives – one might call it the mood ...”

“... Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... Richard Holt begins his book on French sport with two misleading observations. In the one, he recalls that when, in the course of his research, a pile of books on football or on cycling arrived on his desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his neighbours were bemused by his reading material. How extraordinary that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf ...”

“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”

“... Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world. I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’ I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ I ...”

“... just about to emigrate, gave her a Bible, and ‘all the revelations I had either guessed or read about elsewhere fell into place.’ At the same time, he lent her books of which she had never heard. I was buried under an avalanche ... Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’, Tsvetayeva’s poems, and a blue-bound volume of Mandelstam, published in a tiny print-run ...”