“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... takeovers and wished us the best of luck, while in another we were received by a team of beady young screen-watchers who might as well have been wearing tee-shirts blazoned with ‘I short-termism.’ But we still had to be sure of getting our message across as best and wherever we could. And that brought us face to face once again with the familiar ...”

“... His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a local pub in which Chatwin, looking up ‘as a young farmhand came in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings ...”

“... of that time for the benefit of readers who may misremember it as well as those who are too young to remember it for themselves. Both writers devise a rhetorical strategy for their rescue missions. Donald adopts the methods of empiricist historiography, withholding so far as possible his own comments on the events of Wolfe’s life and restricting his ...”

“... Nancy thought him thick, and was determined that he should be swapped for one of the brilliant young men she was meanwhile collecting for weekends at Cliveden, the gigantic Astor château on the Thames. Pennant died in the trenches in 1915, leaving Phyllis shattered but free to find a beau ‘in intellectual circles’. Nancy recruited her circle from Lord ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... a past as a psychopathic bandit leader, ‘Satan Joao’, and a sudden repentance to match that of Robert the Devil in the old story which has been his favourite as a child (a story, like ‘St Julien l’Hospitalier’, full of the melodramatic and possibly not spurious appeal of its provision for saving discontinuities, abrupt redemptions in damned ...”

“... servants framed, implemented and ran them. Late in the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor Robert Wagner, there had been some notably unsuccessful efforts at incorporating community participation in anti-poverty programmes. Lindsay, and his young mayoral aides, all newcomers to the day-to-day management of City ...”

“... of ghosts themselves. In the 1940s a vicar reported that he had been embraced by a ‘naked young woman’: in earlier days this wouldn’t have been admitted to the record of the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, on moral grounds if on no other. Finucane concludes that the suffering souls of purgatory are more understandable, not as ...”

“... it was in this immediate context that the Survey of London was born. In 1894, C.R. Ashbee, a young East End architect, with a passionate interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement, was so outraged by the demolition of the Old Palace at Bromley-le-Bow that he set up a Committee for the Survey of London Monuments, which planned to publish lists of all ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... year or two of the originals. Already, too, there is no question of comparable English authors – Robert May, William Rabisha – being translated in the reverse direction. Yet at this period the connections between cookery and other arts and crafts could still be noticed without undue self-consciousness. Pepys and Evelyn may well have discussed with each ...”

“... in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had ...”

“... in verse; and of the poems resurrected from his twenties, that Hardy was fond of the remembered young man who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him ...”

“... William Rees-Mogg should have paid for this to be published for us. Angels is a first novel by a young American poet. Its dedication is to ‘H.P. and to those who have shared their experience, strength and hope’. Who H.P. may be is decently private; but the phraseology directly alludes to the tradition and practice of Alcoholics Anonymous. Angels ...”