“... Foot’s roll-call of Red Shelley’s feminist admirers is especially illuminating – Harriet Taylor, J.S. Mill, Olive Schreiner, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf. Shelley’s modern reputation has too often suffered from the outmoded phrasing of his other 19th-century disciples, who saw him as a would-be religious idealist, a winsome child who was, as ...”

“... more with that almost gay, charmed, doomed circle – Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Peter Taylor. They are written about not as authors but as friends, or, like Eliot and John Crowe Ransom, avuncular elders to be lovingly gossiped about. Eliot, on their second meeting, asked him if he didn’t hate being compared with his relatives? ‘I do.’ There ...”

“... one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is reported as ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... too much’) and travels beyond the city walls to the Protestant cemetery, where her friend Martha Taylor is buried, and continues on through ‘valleys, farms and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the ...”

“... welcome is that there’s no spirit of the Blitz about all this and not much moaning either. Had Richard Branson dared to show his face on his own train he wouldn’t have had much of a welcome, but then a burly and bullying man who squeezes his way down the aisle saying, ‘We must all write to the Daily Mail’ doesn’t get much sympathy either. Notably ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... in public as she was willing to go in private. In 1992, in a letter to the Eurosceptic MP Teddy Taylor, she wrote:I would personally think it is terribly important that those who have been very doubtful about the European enterprise should have some kind of alternative strategy clearly set out … I have always felt that the best answer for us was to be a ...”

“... thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either ...”

“... border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected in Cary Grant: ‘Being the pursued doesn’t make him weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous.’ It was, really, an advert – for the ...”

“... from Noel Annan, A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, J.B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, A.J.P. Taylor and Angus Wilson – in the full list, unlike in this sample, the heteros outnumber the homos. Encouraged by this apparently principled and broad-minded response, Dyson set up the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and applied to some of these supporters to ...”

“... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...”

“... reduced me to sudden tears.) I began absorbing ever more specialised fare: Macdonald’s books, Taylor and Tuchman on the political background, battle histories of Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele, books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor ...”