“... make the allusion plain: their columns open out into great branches. The idea goes both ways. Robert Frost wrote of his forest of ‘young fir balsams like a place/Where houses all are churches and have spires’. As god is to man, Friedrich seems to say, so man is to nature: we are the ones who shape it, who isolate and set off its beauty. But the ...”

“... in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a variation on one), where the curtains were never opened. Neither book was so huge as to destabilise the whole experience of reading. Bottom’s Dream does that. I first saw the book on the Newly Arrived shelves ...”

“... the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a moment, the vexed presences of Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee, it is worth considering how many statues – the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association counts 925 in the UK – should continue to enjoy the protection of our respect. Should Charles James Fox? I have often wondered what I would say were I ...”

“... to just say ‘dracarys’ and turn her dragons on her opponents – to become ‘draconian’. In Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of Beowulf, the dragon is the result of Beowulf’s seduction by the mother of the monster Grendel – the latest iteration of the curse cycle that also produced Grendel. There are exceptions, of course: in recent children’s ...”

“... experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine ...”

“... the grateful monarch would abdicate in his favour, can only be attributed to plain lunacy. Robert Darnton reports on the autobiography of an itinerant glazier, born in Paris in 1738, a low-life Lovelace who outstrips all the window cleaner/travelling salesman jokes with his 64 seductions. If Jacques Ménétra is so extensively successful that he seems ...”

“... The Guermantes circle is treated in similar fashion. Even the noble youths, Sebastian Flyte and Robert de Saint-Loup, who are supposed to initiate the middle-class narrators into the secrets of aristocratic aestheticism, are irredeemably flawed. That kind of snobbery which Desmond MacCarthy called ‘foolishly looking-up’ is a fairly minor fault common to ...”

“... Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ came out at much the same time as John Pocock’s The Diary of a London Schoolboy 1826-30, published by the Camden Society. John Pocock, 12¾, decisively a real person, was a builder’s son who lived on the edge of Kilburn, two miles out of London. In his journal, written on the empty pages of an old bankbook, he notes that on 23 May 1826 he walked to school: ‘Old Monk drinks like a fish ...”

“... Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has spewed his contempt for teachers, critics, literary editors, the scholars ...”

“... hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the first time in the Sixties, when Robert Aldrich, resisting the advances of Bette Davis, asked her to repeat her portrayal of June Buckridge in the film version of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George. Sister George was an important turning-point. Her career had brought her to the ...”

“... It is noteworthy that Monica Baldwin nowhere figures in this book. What does figure is Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart’s diary, 1915-1938, which is used as a major authority. Bruce Lockhart was a delightful man and, in certain fields, an interesting writer. As a social historian he is nowhere. He was a social climber who, like many such, had but scanty ...”

“... provenance goes further back. It was, in fact, the title of a book published in 1960 by the late Robert Kennedy, following his investigations of corruption in the Teamsters’ union in the era of Jimmy Hoffa. In taking up the phrase, of course, Thatcher has given it her own twist of paranoid populism. What needs to be added, however, is that Scargill is the ...”

“... precisely from the skill with which he has blocked off implication and afterthought. Long ago, Robert Bridges observed about one of Keats’s lines that ‘it displayed its poetry rather than its meaning.’ That was once a criticism, certainly, but neither the old nor the new Decorated styles are subject to the censure that attends the absence of meaning ...”

“... and especially little by comparison with the achievements of German philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius. English Classicists are inclined to regard anything later than Silver Age Latin as beneath their notice, thus perpetuating the prejudices of Renaissance scholars (who could at least claim to have read some of the works they rejected). British ...”

“... backbenchers who scented blood and enjoyed the chase, and were afterwards filled with remorse. Robert Crouch, as the constituency MP for North Dorset, was obviously the front runner, but as on so many such occasions there were more formidable politicians to raise the temperature and stir the pot. Crouch alone would not have stirred the 1922 Committee, but ...”