“... which people were ever liable to be moved by words themselves without thought to what ‘weight of matter’ they connoted. It became indeed commonplace in the 17th and 18th centuries to speak (as Locke did) of people supposing ‘Words to stand also for the reality of Things’. It is a theme which reaches an intellectual climax in Jeremy Bentham (Theory of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the world at large will obey this call to give up looking for the life in the work is another matter. Some, of course, are already persuaded. Colin Burrow scrupulously resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the ...”

“... of colour when heard against a background of gunfire. Fussell is sourly entertaining also on the matter of army and government incompetence: huge military fuck-ups that have been played down or suppressed, boastful predictions (about tank-power and ‘precision’ bombing) that turned out to be grotesquely wrong. Whenever possible, he indicates that the Huns ...”

“... his ‘arcadian’ period closed with his production of The Seagull. It was designed by Jocelyn Herbert, who had defined their visual idiom; Peggy Ashcroft, a founder council member of the ESC, played Arkadina, George Devine played Dr Dorn, and Vanessa Redgrave – by then Richardson’s wife – played Nina. His account of The Seagull at the Queen’s ...”

“... named John Möller, but characteristically kept the fact to himself. Born in Lübeck and named Herbert Frahm, after his mother, the boy was introduced by his grandfather Ludwig Frahm to the elaborate world of working-class culture which the Social Democrats had constructed. It was not enough for him. He broke with the SPD’s stolid complacency in ...”

“... to do so in such a way that the people he came in contact with enjoyed it too. This was not a matter of sympathy, or having the gift of intimacy, but more a sort of ‘ray’, like Stiva Oblonsky’s in Anna Karenina. Yet obviously Duff Cooper was no more like Stiva than like Stendhal’s hero. His biographer, who does not sound as if he would be much ...”

“... whole of history. It is that minority with which I am concerned. The opinions of the others do not matter a rap to me. There speaks a man who had no formal education beyond secondary school, who survived into the age of the computer when school-children are lucky to learn even a little about any of ‘the great figures in literature’. No modern British ...”

“... issue to have an affinity with Donne: Bishop’s contemplative clarity has the cunning of George Herbert. Bishop’s poems start most often in calm, with unchallengeable announcements of time, position or attitude, then slide into qualifications and inquiries. The difference between statement and reservation may be no more than a syllable, so that error or ...”

“... picture of a life and a time. The position of the author in an autobiography is an interesting matter, to which Strong has clearly given no thought at all. He is the hero of his own life and all people and events are assessed in terms of their importance to him. From his birth weight (just over eight pounds) to his hair, which is still ‘abundant’ at ...”

“... was the rejection of orthogonal geometry and of symmetry, which are authoritarian properties no matter what idiom or polity incorporates them: the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Sens, Beauvais and Troyes are doucer than they would be if whole. They carry the germ of ruination and, hence, of the picturesque, a deathless mode which the cravenly francophile ...”