“... Harman entered the ‘charmed circle’ of aesthetes after passing a shibboleth test imposed by Hugh Gaitskell, who asked: ‘What do you think of Oscar Wilde and all that?’ Her reply, ‘Oh, I think that’s quite all right,’ was spoken with the assurance of one who ‘had not really thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the ...”

“... He went first to Heidelberg to learn German, then in 1892 enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital. His first book, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, when he was 23, owed much to Maupassant and Zola. It was a grimy realist novel about the South London underclass he’d come into contact with through the hospital – a first instance of ...”

“... entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius. As these letters incidentally but consistently demonstrate, he was also a maverick member of the ...”

“... this with the snobbish jokes which run through Milton’s elegies on the university carrier Thomas Hobson (who made a mint by offering students the original ‘Hobson’s choice’ of any horse so long as it was the one nearest the door), and you can see at once that nurserymen had it made: their job was refining nature, and creating little paradises on ...”

“... says a voice in Finnegans Wake, managing to lament the issue in something other than English. Thomas Kinsella announces here that ‘there is a sense that it is up to us together to overcome the old dividing idiocies and employ our energies directly, as best we can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The ...”

“... Enlightenment’, a Trojan horse concept smuggled into the historical canon by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Yet, in spite of its metropolitan connections and aspirations, which so irritate modern nationalists and complicate the very notion of a Scottish Enlightenment, the 18th-century Scots intelligentsia – unlike the English – did unite under a ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”

“... on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and ...”

“... Merciless Parliament of 1388, from which Chaucer’s former boss Brembre went to the gallows and Thomas Usk, one of the few people in the period who did mention Chaucer as a poet, to the more dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and beheading – he changed sides (to Chaucer’s) too soon and too prominently. The effect of all this on Chaucer’s ...”

“... rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, and in his letter to Tessimond observes that the young poet ‘must be very much out of the world to have invoked me … from oltre tomba’. Tessimond’s neglect, both in his lifetime and since, is generally put down to his being ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... home is a personage from classical poetry rather than 18th-century agriculture. Gray’s friend Thomas Wharton noted: ‘In England the ploughman always quits his work at noon. Gray, therefore, with Milton, painted from books and not from life.’ He did not seem to mean this as a point against the poet, even if Wordsworth would have taken it as a ...”

“... a thousand years of history, Michael Heseltine finds space to mention the Venerable Bede, Sir Thomas More, Machiavelli, Newton, Catherine the Great and Adam Smith. But unlike Hugh Gaitskell in his memorable speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1962, he sees a closer link with Europe as the logic of a common European ...”

“... admirers and enemies during her golden years. ‘You were given your orders for the day,’ wrote Hugh Walpole. ‘When you’ve had her for five days you want to bang her head through a wall,’ said H.G. Wells. On the other hand, her cousin Katherine Mansfield was grateful, almost against the grain, for her generosity. Keeping a hold on such a number of ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”