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“... Richard Pipes, Russian historian at Harvard and sometime member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, is famous for his hatred of Communism. He doesn’t like Russia much, either. Nor does he particularly care for most Russia and Soviet experts, regarding them as given to romanticising and whitewashing their subject ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... he would settle instead for ‘some of that store-bought stuff that comes in a big, flat bottle, brown, not white ... the kind of stuff white folks drinks’, he said yes, ‘If it held as much as a quart jar’, with mildly unpredictable (or, as Mr Warren alternatively suggests, perhaps predictable) consequences. What is a little disturbing in the account ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... an art lover, a woodworker’, and then again in collective or generic terms:I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race.Monk proceeds to explain ...”

“... rest of it, by the author alone. The crew of distinguished pen-men who helped him in the past – Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott and others – has for the most part been laid off. It is understandable why, after all these years, Brodsky should wish to tackle the job single-handed: poets are seldom natural collaborators, and praise for his command ...”

“... male; age: 35; date of birth: 15.4.1940; height: 5 ft 10 ins; weight: 165 lbs; eyes: blue; hair: brown; married: yes; address: 24A The Boltons, London SW1. The merchandise taken was listed as three suits, valued at $140, $175 and $225, and the witnesses to the document were two Simpson’s store detectives, M. St Jean and Y. Jorken. Across the bottom of the ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”

“... to imply that Montaigne scholarship is an Augean stables, and the condescension aimed at the late Richard Sayce seems quite gratuitous. The crusading zeal against the ET heresy frequently becomes inhibiting, a self-denying ordinance. Thus Marianne Meijer’s otherwise learned and absorbing analysis of the persona of Socrates in Montaigne’s last three ...”

“... chart homophobic legislation around the globe – a perfect inversion of the 19th-century Arabist Richard Burton’s ‘Sotadic Zone’, a vast geographical space, named for the scurrilous Greek poet Sotades, in which the ‘vice’ of homosexuality was allegedly rife. This widening chasm between a liberated ‘us’ and a repressed ‘them’ has created ...”

“... did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public school. Girls, by contrast, remained where they had always been, in the ...”

“... theatre, for instance: in his 1878 Royal Academy showpiece, he cast the supposed murder victims of Richard III as two pretty, tremulous schoolboys poised on a dungeon’s downward-winding stair, their spotlit heads peering into the darkness confronting them, hands anxiously linking, blond chevelures merging into one. The casting, the lighting and the face and ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... portrait composed of largely asserted values illuminating and convincing: disappointingly, in Richard Schacht’s introduction such an enquiry, which would indeed be timely, is not attempted. The last essay, ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’, is designed as an apotheosis of the Master on the occasion of the first Bayreuth Festival of July 1876. ‘In ...”

“... and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it’. Of all the book’s characters, Jo makes the most determined attempt to escape the pull of London, and it doesn’t last. Val, meanwhile, never thinks of leaving, and acts as a sort of den mother to a group of racist thugs, some of them ...”