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“... world. It had just demonstrated thermonuclear supremacy and – at what was literally a knock-down price – acquired an empire. It had no serious adversary, foreign or domestic. Yet at this precise moment (‘There were blacklists; that was well-known. After all, Rudiger was influential, powerful. And who knew how these things were done, through what ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”

“... Hare’ and ‘Letter from a Far Country’, where much is said by leaving the rest unsaid. Richard Murphy, too, leaves a good deal unsaid. The price of stone is high, apparently, but he hasn’t computed it in detail; we are meant to leap from one assessment to the next. To begin with, it is the ...”

“... is likely to be badly printed on ephemeral paper, with no usable margins, at maybe ten times the price you would have paid in the Sixties. Publishers blame the cost of paper and warehousing, and the decline of the reading public. The public blames the publishers for selling out to profit-hungry conglomerates. Bookshops disappear, and the range of titles in ...”

“... The arguments about the miners’ strike will go on for a long time yet, as is evident from Richard Hyman’s piece on another page. My own view remains essentially what it was when I wrote what turned out to be a controversial article last summer (LRB, 6 September 1984). Mr Scargill’s demand that no pit be closed except on grounds of exhaustion was economic nonsense; his attempt to achieve his aims by extra-Parliamentary means which included violence and intimidation had to be defeated; but the support he enjoyed inside and outside the mining communities was an understandable reaction to a government indifferent to high unemployment and worsening poverty, and determined to ram highly contentious policies through Parliament despite the paucity of its electoral support ...”

“... the collapse of Lehman made. The star, or anti-hero, of Lehman’s story is the bank’s last CEO, Richard Fuld. He had worked at Lehman Brothers for 40 years, had been its head for 15, and held unchallenged sway as the person who dominated the bank’s culture and decision-making. The general public’s first sustained look at Fuld came when he testified to ...”

“... out at more than ten sheets per penny. Economy of scale made possible huge profits: the retail price for writing paper was at least three times higher. A register of accounts – on paper, of course – kept by the French notary Denys de Collors, who was living in London in 1359, shows that he paid one or two shillings for two or three quires every month ...”

“... that its hero, a man named Flange, ‘wants children – why it isn’t clear – but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an adult woman. His solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size and demeanour of a child.’ Pynchon seems compelled retrospectively to imagine alternatives which were never available to the characters in the ...”

“... being a schoolboy and being a schoolmaster. Another, it was alleged, had been snapped up half-price on being sent down from Oxford after a distinguished foreign guest at his college, who had the night before stumbled into the unfortunate man’s bedroom mistaking it for his own, announced to the High Table that, as far as he could make out, the most ...”

“... London merchants who dealt in these things were not displeased, and sold them at whatever price they chose.’) A detail from the Clare chasuble. In many ways opus anglicanum was not very English at all. To the names of the thread-makers and embroiderers Christiana of Enfield, Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... hero of this gentle, moving tragicomedy reminds us of nothing so much as a Japanese Vicar of Bray. Richard Yates has been hailed, by Kurt Vonnegut and others, as the chronicler of the generation of middle-class Americans who came of age on the battlefields of Europe in the closing stages of World War Two. In Revolutionary Road (first published in 1961) and his ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... and Ezra Pound, for example, at much 16th-century Italian art. In the Introduction to his book Richard Goldthwaite writes that it is an ‘enlargement of Jacob Burckhardt’s classic – and much-debated – vision of Renaissance Italy as the birthplace of the modern world’. But he takes no interest in the discovery of pagan antiquity, the natural world ...”

“... poets for not getting their facts right. The most notable of these is the great Classical scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who judged the poets by the standards of his own rigorous 18th-century rationalism; a good many people have remarked that his edition of Paradise Lost, in which he used the theory that the text has been interpolated by an amanuensis ...”