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“... In his later years he lost many of the friends he had, except the most right-wing ones and King George V, who found Kipling the only literary figure he could get on with at all. He lost them not only because of his own reactionary views, but also because of the mood they put him in – of dark, unattractive pessimism – and the way he expressed them, often ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West ...”

“... general election approaches, both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to further austerity. George Osborne has made clear that under a Tory government ‘fiscal consolidation’ will be maintained until 2019 at least. Where further savings and cuts – roughly £55 billion over the next parliament, ‘cuts on a colossal scale’ according to the ...”

“... seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to ...”

“... critics, the dictionary includes pieces from the Marxist Noel Burch, the ‘auteur’ theorist Andrew Sarris, the nouveau romancier Claude Ollier and the avant-gardist P. Adams Sitney. And yet, as Roud confesses, ‘this work is less an objective survey than a covert statement, a normative view of the art of the film.’ Roud lists his own ...”

“... and inhuman – Argentines never seem to have achieved anything apart from statistical series. Andrew Graham-Yooll’s A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina’s Nightmare (of which a shorter version was published as Portrait of an Exile in 1981) is a series of sketches that do not offer explanations, but which do memorably convey the singular awfulness of ...”

“... from images of the War in its first years: black-out blinds, allotments, digging for victory,‘George Formby’s uke’, those wrought iron railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems ...”

“... Nabokov: His Life in Part was published. A few months before he died, he gave an interview to George Feifer fulminating at Field as the treacherous ‘Mr X’, his would-be biographer and the purveyor of ‘enormous blunders’. By 1977 Field was no longer the privileged biographer he had been in 1967. Nor is he so privileged in his 1987 book (which, as ...”

“... exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe ...”

“... The world, the flesh and the devil keep coming back, and must be rejected again and again. George Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s ...”

“... historian I was seeking existed and had already begun to make his presence felt. In 1966 George Stocking had argued (in ‘On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of the Behavioural Sciences’) that anthropology could not be said to have a proper history at all until it was no longer conducted as a game of ...”

“... suspect culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of F.R. Leavis. Andrew Brown’s J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science is better at satisfying biographical than historical curiosity. It is not the first book based on the Bernal Archive, now in the Cambridge University Library, but it gives us more of the facts than all its ...”

“... next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the ...”

“... Overt, a ‘student of fine prose’, is keen to learn what he can from an older writer, Henry St George. Early in the story, Overt meets St George’s wife. He ‘would never have taken the important little woman in the aggressively Parisian dress for the domestic partner of a man of letters’, James writes. Such wives ...”

“... states? The answer lies, of course, in the recent history of the culture wars and in George W. Bush’s clear identification with the militancy of the Christian Right. Bush plausibly and successfully campaigns as the Christian plain man voicing the grievances of the common people against the pampered liberalism of an elite typified by John ...”