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“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... historians of the modern period, as well as others, would do well to take ritual seriously. They may discover that its role hasn’t changed as much as one would think it had, despite the disappearance, at any rate in the industrialised world, of ‘traditional’ societies. ‘Traditional societies’, though, is much too vague. There are important ...”

“... vanished from the world. What people forget is how long it was kept up. Reared on books like Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language, students and teachers of English literature, as of English history, tend to assume that if a book isn’t in English then it must be ‘obscurantist, untypical and irrelevant’. By making this ...”

“... a hit-and-run driver (the miseries in Wilson’s narratives are invariably the acts of a God who may perhaps just be an insurance company fiction). Giles remained, a sightless scholar blundering uselessly in his library. As we encounter him, he is attended by two virgins: his luscious teenage daughter Tibba and his dowdy amanuensis, Miss Agar ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... historical contexts. A.A. Long’s recent book on Epictetus, like the work of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji on ancient philosophical therapy, reminds us of something lost in the modern academy and not at all prominent in Kenny, but regarded by all major Greek and Roman thinkers from Socrates on as the heart of the matter: the idea and practice of ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... prose style with its witty banter, metaphorical gusto, dazzling vocabulary and sheer erudition may be seen as a heroic attempt to pull himself out of the quagmire by turning all that happens to or around him into fineness. He is a pathological enhancer, whether of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or ...”

“... the first in October 1979, a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. ‘Eloquently’: was that the right word? Not really. Frank’s writing was so much more exact, more stylish, more patient, more ironic, more playful, more attentive, more ...”

“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... a time there, acting as nightwatchmen) and the (quite interesting) personal life of the founder. Richard, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion was a collector on a fairly grand scale. When he died early in 1816, he owned about ten thousand printed books, 130 illuminated manuscripts, musical scores (most famously the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), paintings ...”

“... was especially crucial to the natural experimentalism of the American arts.’ Pound’s poetry may be ‘flawed and idiosyncratic’, but ‘he knew all the time that he was fighting for a new poetry and a new interpretation of all the literature and culture of the past.’ Williams ‘believed in the power of distinctive American speech to give writing a ...”

“... class is amusing, Jilly Cooper has not let her subject down. She quotes the Registrar General and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations acute, and since she does not try her hand at analysis, it is hard to fault her. Yet the ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... downtrodden poor, filthy rich, or just lovable child – and which led some photographers, Richard Avedon for example, to borrow the ethnographic mode to suggest that the person in a picture can speak for him or her self.Official portraiture offered its own opportunities. James Waterhouse, who was having a terrible struggle with the heat on an ...”