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“... Study of Some Homosexual Generals one of the most interesting books I have read this year. General Richardson was a decorated Army doctor (DSO and OBE). He writes with such intelligence, conversational elegance and compassion that his remark, in his Acknowledgments, that he is only an amateur author, seems absurd. His book is a joy to read, and stimulating ...”

“... John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5 ...”

“... are the early years of the English Stage Company, started in 1955 by George Devine and Tony Richardson, although the theatre enjoyed at least as luminous a period from 1904 to 1907 when Harley Granville-Barker was its artistic director. The Royal Court is the perfect size for a playhouse; it seats about four hundred people (two hundred fewer than in ...”

“... commonplace. We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.’ Not so, responds Robert Richardson; we will say 670 pages more on the topic. By the end you might wonder whether Emerson wasn’t rather in the right of it. An unremarkable, rather spartan, childhood; average performances at school and university; an appointment to, followed by a ...”

“... sometimes ungenerous Olivier, the invariably envious Wolfit and the amiable but rather straitlaced Richardson. And of course both books have to deal with the crisis of 1953. Gielgud was arrested for soliciting, and although Morley and his publishers claim to have dealt for the first time fully, frankly and sympathetically with this episode there is a perfectly ...”

“... with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... was renewed in 1960 with a programme of long-distance observation conducted by the astronomer Frank Drake. He called it Project Ozma, after the rightful ruler of Oz in the Frank L. Baum stories, and pointed a National Radio Astronomy Observatory telescope at the stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, which are similar ...”

“... deft and thoughtful study. In 1957 Watt published The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Few works of criticism from the second half of the 20th century have been more influential. The Rise of the Novel, MacKay reports, ‘continues to be amplified, supplemented or attacked – it must somehow be reckoned with – by every ...”

“... fate, and few may know that the familiar expression has a nautical origin. According to Sir John Richardson, as quoted in the OED, it happens thus: ‘when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the masts, instantly staying the inward course and giving her stern way, an accident ...”

“... Isherwood returned the tepid compliment, 12 years later, with a script for the Tony Richardson production of The Loved One. The movie regularly makes the lists of alltime turkeys. Would that my enemy had written a book and I might adapt it for the screen. The stock of the various members of the Auden Gang has fluctuated over the decades, and ...”

“... deplored by anxious parents, especially parents of girls, as the source of dangerous imaginings. Richardson, Rousseau and Sterne are important here, but so are a troop of female writers: Jane Austen, here delicately analysed, but also Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney and others. Dr Johnson remarked that the ‘call for books’ had greatly ...”

“... of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to the pop star and displayed the universal hand symbol for masturbation’. The Material Girl herself interrupted a speech on how FG ‘stood for several qualities’ by chirping: ‘How about mediocrity?’ So there is sales ...”

“... of building, and of buildings, in mind. The amputee’s husband is an architect, they live near Frank Lloyd Wright’s old house, and the memorial service for the amputee’s friend who kills herself is held at Wright’s Unity Temple. Ware’s drawings are strictly ruled: many of the frames are organised in series of squares, at regular intervals, with ...”

“... Herzog, and there must be more. But it seems almost as rare as duelling, which, still important in Richardson, crops up anachronistically in Flaubert, and even more so in Wyndham Lewis. Wronged spouses in novels mostly seem to be miserable rather than furious or sullied – the Prince de Clèves, for instance, and Karenin, Ford’s heroes and Tony Last. The ...”

“... need for them), there are some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and some poems of which the same might be said. The 100-page introduction is lovingly minute in its coverage of early commentary, and the annotations are careful and useful. The ...”