“... that readers remember and long to reread are usually those which treat their subjects – no matter how remote – as places the writers remember and long to revisit. Historical nostalgia need not imply a desire simply to flee the bewildering present, to go back home, as Thomas Wolfe put it, ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory’: the historian’s ...”

“... from ‘the feminine character.’ [une nature féminine]? Or is it rather for the most part a matter of social behaviour, varying from epoch to epoch as customs change? History shows us that the idea of motherly love is peculiarly subject to evolution. After a long period of indifference [presumably of mothers towards their offspring], a new type of ...”

“... whose war etchings registered only ‘useless horror’ – is followed by ripostes from Herbert Read and others. Hilaire Belloc’s paean to Franco as a knight in shining armour would not look out of place in the Spectator of today. Extracts from Homage to Catalonia stand out like beacons, as do the extracts from the sociologist Franz Borkenau’s ...”

“... makes even the least frivolous ironist feel very small. Enright complements Davie, too, in the matter of insufficiency. ‘Kierkegaard wrote in his Journals that for a Christian irony is not enough because it can never answer to the terrible truth that salvation entails the crucifixion of God. True, irony is never enough, for anyone. Yet, one is inclined ...”

“... On fundamentals, both sought the same goal. The schisms of the Fifties were a different matter. To be sure, foreign and defence policy loomed almost as large as they had done in the Thirties. As before, Right and Left couched their arguments in socialist language. Once again, some of the leading left-wingers of the period turned out to be more ...”

“... out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his contemporaries, civility could be a matter of the way people interacted, the ‘civil conversation’ prized by Stefano Guazzo, author of an influential book on manners and behaviour translated into English in the 1580s. In this sense, civility was a Continental import: England’s ...”

“... can be reasonably made of the critic is that he be original. In the last analysis, it doesn’t matter if he is right or wrong, bigoted or generous, narrow-minded or catholic, provided he says his own say, gets his own feelings straight and sets up his own standards for inspection and, if necessary, for disagreement; provided, that is, he creates his own ...”

“... modernity altogether, is at the heart of Modernism. The pre-modern in Eliot’s poetry is a matter of Fisher Kings and fertility cults; in his prose it is a question of classical order, Tory traditionalism and the Christian church. In both cases, however, a discredited individualism must yield to a more corporate form of being, roughly at the time when ...”

“... of green hopes and aims. ‘The future of socialism may lie more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it win the support of its ...”

“... be one of the latter. But he has a wonderful ear for voice in unfamiliar and little-known poems by Herbert, Graves, Christina Rossetti, Kenneth Ashley, and he opens with a marvellous one – surely his own discovery – by the Medieval chronicler John Lydgate, about a horse called Lyarde, too old now to work. They lead him to the smithy to pull off his shoon ...”

“... In 1967, Herbert Marcuse published a little essay entitled ‘The End of Utopia’, which now reads like a document of a long lost civilisation. Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that ‘there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production ...”

“... of conduct, many of them militaristic. Did Yukio Mishima read Edward Carpenter? The answer could matter quite a lot, as this might rescue the vexed question of ‘sexual politics’ from a purely English discussion, and perhaps throw light on other options within sexual radicalism than those of vegetarian socialism. It would also extend the discussion beyond ...”

“... magnificent love-compliment, ‘Two Ways of It’, a poem which, in the manner of some of George Herbert, even as it denounces the hyperbolical achieves it. Such a sophisticated manoeuvre is highly rhetorical in a way not allowed for by Crozier when he denounces Larkin and Hughes and Heaney ‘as rhetoricians, in fact’. 1960 was late for such ...”

“... be long-forgotten practitioners of Imperial history like Charles McLean Andrews, Samuel Beer and Herbert Osgood.) A prolific writer on 20th-century politics, Draper has concentrated in his 13 previous books on events in which he was either a participant or a close observer. The books include studies of American Communism, Fidel Castro’s revolution, the ...”

“... to kill one man. Most of the book deals with the shifting battle tactics of Gough and General Sir Herbert Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, as seen from command level (a good overall map of the entire Western Front would have been a help), but there are occasional horrific glimpses of life at the slimy end: men shoulder-high in mud advancing on ...”