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“... their home airfield when the undercarriage gave way on landing. When the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard talks dismissively about ‘Brabazon bands’ he is alluding to an ill-fated post-war British airliner. A rock band can be beautiful to look at, sound as sleek and smooth as you like, the gnarled Richard is saying, but ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to ...”

“... surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent discrimination of a spectator at the Rose Bowl parade. Each float – Puritanism, American Naissance, Modernism, Post-Modernism – seems, as it purrs by, at once more ornate than its predecessor and more elementally vigorous in its overturning of tradition. Always there is the promise of something ...”

“... suit silhouette by adding oversized pleats and reattaching shredded fabric in a death rose embroidery.’ The designer said the collection is made in ‘a plethora of blue hues and mashed-up pinstripes that make the models look like walking battleships’. I looked at the Chinese man. ‘Awesome, huh?’ he said. There were something like seventy ...”

“... In fact I was very naive. In Steinberg’s eyes, Israel is the modern-day Dreyfus, and judge Richard Goldstone and his co-authors are the military court, perpetrators of injustice falsely indicting the ‘entire Jewish nation’ of war crimes.3 This takes some doing, not least because Goldstone, as well as being a Jew, has been so deeply involved in ...”

“... unlike the England of today, could conceive of … a merry supernaturalism’.‘Shakespeare never rose higher’ than in this play, which with its ‘silliness and violence’ leads us to think the ‘rowdies’ have ‘climbed over the footlights’. This mob rule is offered as the common sense of the man in the pub: ‘If ever the son of a man in his ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South ...”

“... Pazzi and Rucellai families of their position as clients of the Medici. Some contributors, like Richard Goldthwaite (on consumer demand) and Bill Kent (on ties of neighbourhood), write well about topics on which they have already written elsewhere. Others break new ground, notably Ronald Weissman on ‘Mediterranean Values and Renaissance Society’ and ...”

“... generally referred to as the ‘Baines Note’ and the ‘Remembrances’. The first, compiled by Richard Baines, is exclusively concerned with Marlowe’s atheistic opinions, while the second reports the words of another man, Richard Cholmeley, who is said to have been converted, or ‘persuaded’, to atheism by ...”

“... but on Joyce’s work as a whole, he is vigorously interesting and helpful. The body-language of Richard Brown’s book is far more specific than Parrinder’s, but his assumptions are much the same. He has two aims in mind. ‘One tries to place Joyce’s work in the context of ideas in which he participated.’ The ideas in view are mainly connected with ...”

“... by a man obsessed with time. Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745), the son of a London silk weaver, rose to prominence in the early decades of the 18th century as England’s leading art theorist and portraitist. Abandoning a career as a scrivener, he went on to paint writers (Pope, Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley ...”

“... The other, less flattering image comes from the gathering in the Queen’s Gallery to hear Richard von Weisaecker make an address. The President of West Germany, speaking a crystalline, virtually unaccented English, spoke for about half an hour with restraint, wisdom and the quiet earnest of a man gravely engaged upon serious things. He had been ...”

“... of pure doctrine left or remaining, this aforesaid Wickliff, by God’s providence, sprang and rose up, through whom the Lord would first waken and raise up again the world.’ Wyclif the morning star, Wyclif aka John the Baptist, Wyclif the proto-Protestant. For his 19th-century editor, a German schoolteacher called Rudolf Buddensieg, Wyclif was ‘the ...”

“... the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane, would be much exercised by the discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s ...”