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“... laid out in an article in Rape, a well-known 1986 collection edited by Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, which is still one of the best guides to different theories in this field. But what is really objectionable about the book has very little to do with its gender politics, much more with its arrogant scientism and messianic zeal for evolutionary ...”

“... by reading some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called ...”

“... on the linked topics of sexuality, hysteria, imitation and iatrogeny. Following Elaine Showalter, Roy Porter and other scholars, Appignanesi presents hysteria as the pathology that, more startlingly than any other, reveals the paradoxes of imitation and selfhood, expression and collusion and control, as they play out between (usually female) patient and ...”

“... on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of the Foreign Office induce a ...”

“... character seemed merely eccentric. For once Johnson was wrong. At the recent memorial service for Roy Porter, chronicler of and enthusiast for an English Enlightenment, an especially appropriate reading was the wonderful opening of Tristram Shandy, where Tristram explains his botched conception as a consequence of his father’s ludicrous, idiosyncratic ...”

“... 1702 sought his fortune in the seething medical marketplace of London. The metropolis then was, as Roy Porter has said, ‘a world of quacks’. It was also a world of orthodox medical princes. And sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. The properly credentialled physicians who rode about in their coaches-and-six, and lashed out at the unprincipled ...”

“... and his acolytes – has come under heavy fire from Enlightenment champions such as the late Roy Porter. The polarities echo tensions in the period itself, when images of a brave new world of self-governing, go-getting individuals collided with fears of moral anarchy. The elevation of once despised, divinely forbidden desires – for ...”

“... extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his ...”

“... to add to them would be the unearthing of new evidence or a radically different interpretation. Roy Jenkins says he is not ‘a great partisan of the “revelatory” biography’, and claims that for Churchill nearly all the ‘facts’ are known in any case. One of Best’s motives for writing his book is to scotch some of the wilder recent ...”

“... began to have a reasonable chance of a decent lifespan. The hazards were daunting, however, and Le Roy Ladurie gives a graphic account of them. Thomas had his first narrow squeak as an infant in the Swiss Valais, when he wandered out from the house of the aunts who were raising him into the snow and almost froze to death; still a small child, he was hauled up ...”

“... as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a ...”

“... in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and pliant ...”

“... three voices of the 16 in A Various Art to emerge most strongly have enjoyed critical sponsorship: Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne in Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson through her own theoretical book Poetic Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define ...”

“... was not in the least embarrassed when he explained to me that the lights were actually for Roy Orbison and that we would be having our ‘little chat’ in the far, dark corner of the room to which he was now leading me. Our little chat consisted of him asking me exactly who I was, and even this thin line of inquiry petered out when the Big O, plus ...”

“... of the 17th century turned the inquiry into the human condition towards the body is the subject of Roy Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003), an important study unaccountably missing from Forth’s bibliography. Porter discusses Descartes, who arguably began the preoccupation with fat as both symptom and ...”