“... formidable rationalist who destroys the faith of the hapless clerical hero of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere. At the age of 38, Pattison narrowly missed becoming Rector of Lincoln in an election which he has described in a manner that makes the late C.P. Snow’s account of a somewhat similar affair seem milk-and-water stuff. Pattison took refuge in ...”

“... a rebuke to liberalism’s recent retreat ‘into a deadening private and individual care for the self’. Religious intensity is not new, then, to American politics. But the present convergence of politics and religion is, Colombo believes, unprecedented and deeply alarming. Although the new Christian Right began gathering strength shortly after World War ...”

“... consistently lively.’ This is pure Dryasdust, a pretended apology masking the author’s self-satisfaction. There are other Scottish characteristics in Augustus. The hero has a slave, called Septimus, a bonnie laddie from the Sabine Hills, ‘with ungrammatical Latin and long vowel sounds’, who recalls the despondent Augustus to his duty by ...”

“... In particular, he praises Baldwin’s careful fostering of Labour, which was done partly from self-interest (socialists made easier targets than Liberals) but partly also from a disinterested desire to provide a constitutional context for inevitable social change. Certainly, however culpable Baldwin may have been of ‘putting party before country’ in ...”

“... media than in the hierarchy between them. Gauguin called the ear ‘inferior to the eye’, and Robert Delaunay confessed, in a letter to Franz Marc, that he was ‘horrified by music and noise’ and mistrusted ‘auditory perception’. August Endell, an architect associated with the Jugendstil movement, believed that no visual art had yet succeeded in ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford ...”

“... extinction. He hoped that the development of new satellite suburbs – clusters of interconnected, self-sufficient, ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ – would slowly empty out the capital. London’s property bubble would burst; rents would fall; and the slums would be pulled down to make way for parks, gardens and allotments: ‘the country,’ Howard ...”

“... of some of his less endearing characteristics. He even says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the ...”

“... rather than a succession of brilliantly-lit set-pieces, but the whole thing has such extraordinary self-assurance that complaints soon die away.That calm eccentric boldness is, for reasons I can’t pretend to know, a stylistic habit of the present moment, but only of some women writers. Perhaps they have rediscovered and modernised kinds of attention, kinds ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... In​ How to be Topp (1954), Nigel Molesworth unveils ‘the Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-you Letter’. The sender is instructed to strike out the words which don’t apply, before thanking the present-buyer for theTrain. Tractor. germ gun. kite.delicious present. sweets.Space pistol. Toy socks.The letter ends with a blank space to be filled in with a date to remind the recipient when the next present is due ...”

“... also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According ...”

“... pathologically ashamed was but the return to roost of fledglings hatched in the nest of Jewish self-assertion: ‘the very notion of being chosen by such a God will produce the retribution appropriate to it.’ Yahweh is the projection of Israel’s desire to be above other nations. Election, the chosen people, the choosing God – all are the fantasy of a ...”

“... of Bloomsbury, and of Vita in particular, but his shotgun method reached many others, including Robert Graves and Laura Riding, J.C. Squire, and London literary politics in general. Some of the lines are funny, even witty, but more often the abuse is heavy, repetitious and sprawling: when Campbell was hating, he didn’t know when to stop. Still, the poem ...”

“... undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s confidence that a reasonably large readership will be fascinated by the whims, fantasies and extravagances which spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like ...”