“... men all professing the same creed and all working in exact uniformity to the same end... And, as Shaw remarked, he is deteriorating. This stumping the country, talking abstractions and raving emotions, is not good for a man’s judgment, and the perpetual excitement leads, among other things, to too much whisky.’ There were things even worse than whisky ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

“... and Stefan Zweig. From the list of two thousand people to be eliminated Lloyd George and Shaw are expressly exempted. When the invasion has succeeded the Duke of Windsor will resume his throne and Henry Williamson replace the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. If these instructions and predictions derive from a genuine ...”

“... attributes the misery he depicts to the economic philosophy that was predominant. He quotes John Law, with implicit approval, when Law referred to the ‘ranks of the great army’ of unemployed that ‘goes marching on heedless of stragglers, whose commander-in-chief is laisser-faire, upon whose banners “Grab who can” and “Let the devil take the ...”

“... that the owners of the Times could have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he ...”

“... prince’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for ‘excruciating details’ about George VI’s diet. Shaw once said that Coriolanus was ‘Shakespeare’s greatest comedy’, on the grounds that we don’t sympathise with any of the characters, and there are moments on reading about the Blacks when one feels the same. The physically bulky, intellectually ...”

“... highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist ...”

“... a generous critic, and he was generous to me when, later on, he proposed his collected writings on Shaw to MacGibbon and Kee. It is probably due to the demise of the big subscription libraries that critics nowadays have less power to make books sell. Enthusiastic reviews used immediately to bring in repeat orders by the hundreds. Now that is all gone, although ...”

“... a mixture of derision and admiration. From Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and Graham Norton, John Bull’s other island has furnished the British with a series of talented court jesters, praised and patronised in equal measure. Ireland was burdened with the task of writing much of ...”

“... is, has been largely transmitted via his impact on Milton and Shakespeare: in 1896 George Bernard Shaw could still suggest that the only reason for reading Marlowe (whom he dismissed as ‘the true Elizabethan blank verse beast … wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion’) was in order better to understand ...”

“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a series of surrogate mothers willing to provide the affection and intellectual stimulus that she ...”

“... when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from which nothing could shift ...”

“... teens, C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music ...”

“... of the most striking examples described by Professor Wernham was the naval expedition led by Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake in 1589. If they had obeyed the Queen’s instructions and sailed to Santander and San Sebastian, he believes they would probably have been able to destroy the battered half of the Armada which was sheltering and re-equipping in ...”