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“... mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he writes, ‘challenges the easy distinctions between popular and high art, and the critical language that normally sustains those distinctions’. Implicitly, perhaps he did ...”

“... to know, but it mostly neglected the point that as a source of knowledge about political events, Dick Crossman’s testimony – even his testimony to himself – needed, to put it mildly, a good deal of interpretation. His individual and sometimes malign preoccupations provided no surrogate for a Cabinet Hansard. It can rightly be said that more ...”

“... It may also have helped Ian Smith’s Rhodesia; though, again, Walton has no proof. MI5’s Dick White claimed that SIS had collected ‘evidence’ of homosexuality with which to blackmail Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, but the papers aren’t yet available to back this up (or otherwise). We know SIS was involved in the ousting of Mossadeq in Iran in ...”

“... Chopin’s contemporaries have made it popular with professors today. In fact, according to Bernard Koloski, the editor of Approaches to Teaching Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ (MLA, 1988), it is ‘something of a teacher’s dream – a classic though topical novel that students respond well to after a first reading, yet an exceptionally rich literary ...”

“... about it, and an orgiastic one, where one is cosmically-life-affirmingly-overwhelmed by it, as Bernard Levin is. What we are talking about when we talk about opera becomes an intriguing moral moment. People who talk about it well seem to do it very well, to be able to be large-minded and yet sceptical at the same time. (True Wagnerians do not think that ...”

“... been right. In the 1970s journalistic suspicion and criticism of the ‘secret state’ mounted. Dick White, a head of SIS, told a colleague that even his own children had complained about his ‘shady business’. He had replied: ‘Do you consider me to be any less good a husband and father and good citizen?’ Aldrich thinks that rejoinder was ‘a good ...”

“... artisans and farmers, Thompson has clear sailing. These were no ambitious, enterprising, wandering Dick Whittingtons (apparently his base-line point of comparison), whatever their ‘restless, youthful mobility’; they neither wanted nor achieved much betterment. They were ‘resolutely rooted’ people whose families had scarcely budged for generations and ...”

“... borrowing the sonorous qualities of one art-form to make up for the artistic failings of another. Bernard Mac Laverty’s strength has always been his linguistic focus on minutiae, his depiction of the parochial through luminescent language. Lines from his short stories fizzle in the memory years after we read them. There’s the Grandmaster in his collection ...”

“... or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’. Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I remember’s from his sparklingly original and ‘totally great’ (to use one of his own favourite locutions) memoir, I Remember, issued in four instalments between 1970 and 1973, and then collected in a single ...”

“... sexual freedom when the reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in common, then, was ...”

“... are, on the whole, nuanced and balanced, surprisingly so at times; in 2014, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, published a respectable biography of James Madison. Still, there’s a lurking suspicion that the public interest in the lives of dead white patriarchs is predominantly hagiographical.Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is ...”

“... this debacle, he later took a strong line about feminine demands on him, somewhat in the manner of Dick in The Devil’s Disciple. Among those he tormented were Edith Bland, whose husband Hubert was unfaithful. Failing to get Shaw into bed, she made her famous complaint: ‘You had no right to write the Preface if you were not going to write the book.’ Then ...”

“... In fiction, however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 ...”

“... of characters, supposedly abandoned, such as Norman Mushari and Winston Niles Rumfoord. In Deadeye Dick (1982) the setting is Midland City, where Breakfast of Champions was set, with many of its inhabitants revived also. The narrator and hero of Bluebeard (1985) is another character from that novel, Rabo Karabekian, while Galapagos is narrated by the son of ...”

“... the family had been killed in the morning): they were supposed to be dining at Fontainebleu with Bernard Kouchner, who Romand claimed was a friend; on the way there he had attacked and tried to strangle her. All she had wanted was the return of her savings – 900,000 francs she thought she had invested through him in a Swiss account. Hers was the last in a ...”