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“... walk. His look of quizzical apprehension changed to an amiable apology when I explained I was the Richard Shone to whom he had sent a note a few days earlier asking me to ‘drop in’. ‘Yes, of course you are,’ he said. The note had been prompted by Nancy Ackerley, a friend of mine and the sister of Forster’s great friend J.R. Ackerley, who had written ...”

“... heaped on them; and his challenge to the most potent name in Greek historiography provoked from Richard Shilleto, a Cambridge don, a riposte entitled simply Thucydides or Grote? That may be a more complex question than Shilleto realised. Thucydides argued that the Athenian Empire was hated by its subject peoples; admirers ...”

“... He discriminates between both periods and authors, drawing out the ‘passion for Heaven’ in Richard Baxter, the ‘clarity and assurance’ characteristic of Watts, Addison’s gentlemanliness, Charles Wesley’s ‘physicality’, Montgomery as ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer’, the whisper and privacy in Keble’s ...”

“... an inch of difference between Labour and Conservatives, the one-time counter-culture celebrity Richard Neville said long ago, but it is in that space that we live. The opening weeks of the first Labour Government for a generation have been a daily reminder of how far Neville’s aphorism still holds. So tirelessly had Tony Blair strained to ratchet down ...”

“... of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their original discoverer C.D. Walcott ...”

“... reader also found some of the author’s comments rather intrusive. ‘My guess is ...’ ‘There may be something to this ...’ ‘I am inclined to believe ...’ or ‘More important, it seems to me ...’ And one has the impression that he likes his history to fit. He is also too inclined to have his pointers out – ‘Now we move on again, to the West ...”

“... probably skip the hermetic accounts of American football games, as earnest as Sportsnight. They may enjoy Reagan’s tales of his beginnings in radio, including the inadvertent signing-off of Aimée Semple McPherson, the evangelist, with a Mills Brothers record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day’. And they’ll wince at his verdict on filming The ...”

“... a goal but a method.’ ‘Chirac is a De Gaulle with no 18th of June, but available for a 13th of May.’ ‘Proliferation wrecks deterrence ... Indifference rules the world.’ ‘How many journalists,’ Mitterrand wonders, ‘have been killed in their first day on the battlefield of literature?’ Himself, he looks like a survivor: he could certainly earn ...”

“... Sir James’s elevation and his year-long battle to punish Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady Falkender, both victims of Ingrams’s harassment, and which petered out in a relatively painless settlement in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no ...”

“... under Sergei Diaghilev – ‘Big Serge’, as she always called him – or about her husband ‘May-nar’ (with the emphasis on the second syllable).Lydia lived in a substantial house called Tilton at the foot of Firle Beacon, one of the highest of the South Downs. It was set among farm buildings, a pond and a handful of cottages. It could be reached from ...”

“... As a young man, Adolf Hitler became a devotee of the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, and spent much of his meagre income on tickets for performances of Lohengrin and other pseudo-medieval fantasies. Historians have spent a good deal of energy trying to trace the effects of this youthful passion on the later dictator’s ideas and beliefs ...”

“... doing so. Secrecy jurisdictions raise revenue by collecting fees from registering companies. They may also charge fees for regulating the financial services industry located in their domain, and collect tax on the personal earnings of anyone working in that industry. In some locations, such as Jersey, taxes on the profits of banks comprise a significant part ...”

“... between old (sentimental) socialism and the new (hard) left. The hero of News from Nowhere, Richard Stern, updates Caute’s earlier hero, middle-aged, middle-of-the-ideological-road Steven Bright, the fortyish academic trapped between two eras whose crack-up was portrayed in The Demonstration (1970) and The Occupation (1971). The formal advantage of ...”

“... the enduring and improbable stereotype of the journalist-as-hero). Writers, directors and actors may be forgiven for misrepresenting the minutiae of the life of a journalist: they may not, after all, be lucky enough to observe the proprietor, the editor and the reporter, from life. But the one area of which they do have ...”

“... Why are some people creative to the point of genius, even though they may not appear especially intelligent, or in any other way remarkable? Creativity is a long-standing puzzle which has received many trite and no very convincing accounts. Explanations range from the Divine Spark to slogging hard work; from unconscious problem-solving to super-conscious awareness; from the darkness of profound dreams to the brightness of extreme wakefulness; from slow gestations to instant insights ...”