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“... a tonic, then, to pick up Art, Science and Human Progress, a volume of lectures sponsored by the Richard Bradford Trust, which was founded in 1969 ‘to explore the relationships between the methods of scientific investigation and of artistic creation in literature, the visual arts, and other art forms’. The Popperian process of conjecture and refutation ...”

“... Apollinaire’s rhyme, though Padgett makes a brave effort: ‘And you drink this alcohol that burns like your spirit/Your spirit you drink down like spirits.’ Beckett, elsewhere so scrupulous in emulating Apollinaire’s rhymes, here contents himself with a mere assonance: ‘And you drink this alcohol burning like your life/Your life that you drink ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ...”

“... committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way ...”

“... thing is not worth doing then it is not worth doing well. Recently I found myself being praised by Richard Ingrams for my radio quiz performances, which evinced, he said, a properly contemptuous attitude for the job. I have no such attitude, but I have no doubt that Ingrams, despite his notoriously eager availability for such assignments, has. He ...”

“... all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as being ‘parasitic’ on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London Review controversy, and he reprints it ...”

“... are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two-thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford edition, ‘The Transvaal’ (1899), republican freedom is still under attack and Swinburne is still fuming: ‘Patience, long sick to death, is dead,’ it begins. ‘Too long/Have sloth and doubt and ...”

“... Slow), he is the encouraging old pro, spreading the largesse. He recognised and recommended Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), ‘an all-around swell cat’. The literary shoptalk in these letters is free of jargon and brimming with embattled fellow-feeling. Commiseration and comradeship are the dominant chords, although the competitive drive to be the ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... I was laughing. The other guards sprayed me with pepper spray, something they used very often. It burns and makes it hard to breathe. It’s not the only guard I knocked on his face. I pissed on their faces too. I was a bad boy in Guantánamo. Once, in 2005, one of our brothers was badly beaten in front of us. I sat in my room not speaking to anyone all ...”