“... Familiarity,​ oddly enough, is all too often an obstacle to historical understanding. The more we think we know about a period, the more preconceptions we have. In the case of the Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories ...”

“... Ernst, an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud. Over the next five or six years, more members of the family, including Sigmund himself, came to England, where their papers were organised by Marie Bonaparte, who put in a good word with the Duke of Kent. Four of Sigmund’s sisters stayed behind in Vienna and perished in the concentration ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... of the Cold War in domestic politics. Truman’s loyalty programme would eventually trigger more than 500 dismissals and more than 2600 resignations, losses that weakened the mental power and competence of the civil service for decades to come. It took Eisenhower, a less anxious president, to revoke the order in April ...”

“... friend and antagonist, exact contemporary and truest counterpart, was Ernst Bloch, who took the more familiar path through Paris and Prague, and in 1938 sailed for New York. Bloch’s speech ‘Zerstörte Sprache – Zerstörte Kultur’ – delivered to the Association of German Writers in New York in 1939, and published in Moscow that same year – ended ...”

“... exhibition in Washington DC. At the heart of the row was something that will figure even more powerfully next year, in the various commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World: how much should Europe’s conquest of the Americas, as treated today in exhibitions and commemorations, reflect the experience of the ...”

“... British universities cease to be able to attract foreign scholars or to retain many of their own more adventurous lecturers, there is a risk that solemn intransigence of this kind will increase. All communities under intense attack from without are susceptible to dogma, to heresy-hunts, to seeking refuge in the wrong kind of certainties. British history ...”

“... a personal as well as a political message. By the time of the next election it is now no more than an evens bet that there will not be a new Archbishop installed in the chair of St Augustine. Dr Runcie’s own time as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury is, in fact, drawing – if not especially peacefully – towards its close. Since, unlike his ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”

“... the distressing lack of literary interchange between the two countries at present – a lack far more pronounced with poetry than with fiction. Two poets, then, sharing language, youth, and a broadening ocean. At the moment, the criticism of American poetry is a diverse and, at bottom, unnervingly haphazard business. Given the multitudes of poets publishing ...”

“... reports, is regularly interpreted as the trumpet of fame awakening the dreamer. (I am put in mind more of early mornings in households where the parents believe their children to be music-making angels.) The angelic figure’s wings are those of an eagle, and that makes Dr Liebert connect The Dreamer with the ‘presentation drawing’ (whose finished state ...”

“... is less dense, less effortful in the reading, than is the case with the Irish Troubles and, more markedly, with The Singapore Grip. Jane Austen comes to mind, and not only because of the relative domesticity of the story, or its rather Austenish adultress, Mrs Forester: ‘We have decided to be friends, Emily and I, because we find men to be such coarse ...”

“... and almost the entire Behaviourist school – have tended to deny that mind was anything much more than patterns of reflex arcs. Perhaps it is a universal generalisation that great advances, and men of supreme acknowledged achievement from Aristotle onwards, inhibit change and achievement beyond their frontiers of understanding by the awe they cast behind ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... that a civilised gentleman ought to tolerate and patronise. Neville found his own project more difficult. It seems that he began writing his memoir in the Thirties and completed it in the Fifties. He wanted to defend Lawrence – and Lawrence’s parents – against their detractors; somehow, he could not help patronising them and making them seem ...”