“... his career, there was also the sense that his elephantine obsessions were with mouse-scale subject matter: the personal interests of MPs in the first few years after the accession of George III. Namier was accused by some fellow historians – among them his one-time protégé A.J.P. Taylor – of taking the mind out of history: trampling on ideas, principles ...”

“... almost through and through. Now, however, we have Richard Shusterman with a new view of the whole matter. He believes that Eliot is much more interesting as a philosopher than even his supporters think, and that the easy dismissals on the part of such detractors as Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris are founded on political prejudice and uninformed ...”

“... tackle In Memoriam. O-Levellers could be confronting Romeo and Juliet and A-Levellers the poems of Herbert. The central question all of them ask of a work is what it means, and answering this question requires practice, effort, and the knowledge of more than the book alone. The last point is oddly controversial. Facts about how the books originated are given ...”

“... to his house and estate outside Cape Town, and immediately commissioned his favourite architect, Herbert Baker, to find a prominent site in Kimberley and to design for it a memorial to the imperial troops and local militiamen who had died defending the city. Built out of ruddy-yellow granite brought down from Rhodesia, and complete with a massive cannon ...”

“... million Mexicans (half of whom were US citizens). The president that Chu is quoting was of course Herbert Hoover in 1932. Very little that Trump has actually done is without parallel in the Hoover years, and neither is the reaction from mainstream economic theory. A thousand economists delivered exactly the same message to Trump in 2018, making just as little ...”

“... afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it. Even if there were room for doubt in this matter, however, there can be no question that an ex-Colonial transplantee who happens to have done some of his growing up in an English school or ’varsity should be slow to bring forth his cosy reminiscences, and very slow to hand them over to anyone else. So ...”

“... place in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico, perhaps recalled through a fleeting reference in Herbert Read’s The Green Child. (This philosophic fantasy, published eight years before Perelandra and three years before Out of the Silent Plant, has marked kinship with the space fictions, and it is perhaps noteworthy that Lewis’s Perelandran Lady shares ...”

“... the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The Actors’ Guild was a different matter. It won the battle for recognition, and better pay for supporting players, by persuasion in preference to force. It tried to mediate in technicians’ strikes which lost everyone time and money. Under Reagan in particular, it opposed plans for a single ...”

“... fighting books, but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science ...”

“... of Minden, then chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Walpole admits it to be ‘mere matter of suspicion’, but does not hold back on the innuendo: The Irish are not farther removed from the Italians by their situation and climate, than by their manners and the integrity of their amours. The clergy, nay the very bishops of Ireland, are buxom ...”

“... fact of life that we can be horrified by things that we don’t find meaningful; that don’t matter to us despite our wish for them to matter (and with so much horror around not caring becomes a kind of forbidden pleasure). The appetite for inevitability or a sense of inevitability – for the idea of things having to ...”

“... process of a profound change in his attitude towards his own experience’. The change was a matter of learning how to blow up real events and people to mythic proportions. It was Cassady who taught him this: the tear-away adventurer who stole cars and carried off women at a dizzying pace appeared to be more than human. The poetic tropes with which ...”

“... equates white American dreamers with vanished Native Americans. In A Lost Lady young Niel Herbert observes the decline of Mrs Forrester, the grande dame of Sweet Water, Colorado and retroactively lionises her first husband, the rich old Captain Forrester, who ‘dreamed the railroads across the mountains’ and who, late in life, is portrayed as akin ...”

“... a theory exploded by professional historians more than half a century ago under the influence of Herbert Butterfield. Gove’s vision of ‘our island story’ is about examining the ‘struggles of the past’ to see how they brought about ‘the liberties of the present’. Similarly, Schama wants younger generations to ‘pass on the memory of our ...”

“... measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance. Writing to Herbert Read he says: ‘I have been of late exceptionally busy and exceptionally worried, even for me.’ And writing again to his brother he says his life is such a mess that it would make him laugh, ‘if any Eliot could ever laugh’. He likes this one so ...”