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“... 1981, and the death penalty was not formally abolished until 1987. This is the capsule version of Richard Evans’s important new book, trying to do justice to which makes one feel like a hapless contestant in Monty Python’s summarising-Proust competition. The central theme is clear enough: capital punishment was and is the symbol of political ...”

“... can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself ...”

“... It is interesting that Richard Serra, who is not short of offers of highly promising locations for which to make site-specific sculptures, accepted the Tate’s invitation to do something in their domineering central hall – a space ostensibly built for showing sculpture but serving that purpose rather badly, partly because it makes the things put into it look as if they were lost at the bottom of a well, partly because its huge Ionic columns dwarf other forms in the same field of vision ...”

“... and his greatest. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), was one – J.K. Galbraith told Richard Swedberg – that he himself disdained. It was too popular. His first, which he wrote in 1908, when he was 25, irritated the historical economists, who dominated the subject in Austria, with its defence of the new marginalism. His second, The Theory of ...”

“... the Pope to have his son Edmund made King of Sicily, and in Northern Europe by having his brother Richard of Cornwall crowned King of the Romans and thus, nominally at least, heir to the Imperial throne. The Abbey, therefore, was designed to underpin and promote Henry III’s regality. Binski, however, emphatically rejects the widely-held view that ...”

“... of Bowra. But it is the Order of Merit that bulks ever larger, as it does also in Richard Ollard’s biography of A.L. Rowse, A Man of Contradictions. Rowse appears never to have got over the OM awarded to Veronica Wedgwood: ‘ “My OM!” as he grew, with resentful jealousy, accustomed to exclaim.’ Annan, too, scrutinises its recipients ...”

“... Richard Hoggart​ made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor part of Leeds to grammar school and on to university, Hoggart never really made what the novelist Storm Jameson, a generation ahead of him at the University of Leeds, called the ‘journey from the North ...”

“... came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of henna’d hair, short skirt and long skinny legs. It’s the legs that give him/her away, scrawny, unfleshed and too nobbly for a ...”

“... of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it ...”

“... The crisis broke on the eve of the country’s budget, presented by the Finance Minister, Richard Hu. Politicians in the G7 must have read him and wept. He forecast growth rates of up to 8 per cent. It’s ironic that the long-term strategy of the Lion City involves exploiting uncertainty over the financial stability of Hong Kong, but Singapore wants ...”

“... a confident pronouncement: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ Among Americans it is a claim which only a committed utilitarian is likely to wish to dispute. Americans suppose themselves to have many individual rights and, after their respective ideological fashions, take ...”

“... had, after all, reached its climax in Wales. In the summer of 1399, the shattering deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval order, removed the last king of Britain who ruled by undisputed hereditary right. Enough princely blood ran in Glyn Dŵr’s veins to lend a certain legitimacy to his title and to the revolt mounted in ...”

“... and patience for piecemeal communities to get to the point of being regarded seriously, but that may be on its way. The so-called ‘edge cities’, amalgams of super-sized shopping malls and office plazas that mushroomed sensationally round about 1980 near freeway junctions, are one symptom of that adjustment. Few new edge cities are taking shape ...”

“... will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’s memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest.’ Gandhi notwithstanding, scholars and polemicists continue to catalogue the crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are ...”

“... the names that stand out in Pop painting – among them not only Lichtenstein and Warhol, but also Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, each the subject of one of Foster’s five chapters – were collectors, even connoisseurs, of the omnipresent image: they assembled examples of its endlessly mundane oddity in files and scrapbooks; they deployed ...”