“... Bradford where he has been making a programme about the decline of the city. I note that at Kings Cross, unlike me, he goes home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell used sometimes to note in his journal, ‘interesting day’. 7 July. The same week as I ...”

“... then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ancient of nations, he consistently argued that modern nationalism grew out of long-standing ethnic groups. On the ...”

“... looked uncannily like the jurisdiction exercised on behalf of the pope by Wolsey. The historian Anthony Shaw has traced the progress of this vicegerential visitation in a miniature masterpiece of detection, reconstructing its dynamics month by month – and demonstrating that such reconstruction is eminently possible. It all led up to parliamentary ...”

“... thought bold, but much more so 50 years earlier when the home secretary, R.A. Butler, was rather cross with Berlin, implying his temerity might have interfered with his knighthood. Like Auden Berlin seems to have had no visual sense at all and to have been uneasy in the countryside. 28 June. When we were staying at Kington in May we called at ...”

“... poetry as a way of hearing things; and about the fact that in the reading of poetry associations cross one’s mind that one is inclined to dismiss. If the ‘shake’ example seems peculiarly ill-judged when everywhere else in the book Ricks is scrupulous to substantiate his claims in a different way – often by making more complicated and intricate links ...”

“... could be repeatedly rearranged to fit different conceptual schemes. In his book on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organised by topic.From this ...”

“... career. Although he had the backing of the prime minister, Clement Attlee, and although there was cross-party support for the Beveridge Report, which committed the government to some form of universal healthcare, the NHS was forced through in the teeth of opposition from the British Medical Association. One of its achievements was to unify and nationalise the ...”

“... companion and lover, but never wife. The publication, in 2010, of Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, changed the earlier impression of Larkin’s mind and personality, especially the early ‘scandalous’ picture derived from Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Selected Letters (1992). In his introduction to Letters to Monica, Thwaite counts up ...”

“... counterparts … The Forms quicken or destroy a number of people before the central character, Anthony Durrant, who has the intellectual purity and moral power to understand what is happening and how to respond, sends the Forms back to their archetypal world through a magical invocation. Lewis thought the novel ‘one of the major literary events of my ...”

“... their place amongst the monomanias to their eventual classification as neurotic. Of course, if cross-cultural and trans-historical descriptions of obsessional behaviours are not possible, then there is no progress to be charted, and the changing classifications cannot be comprehended by the conceptual reconstruction which Berrios offers. Indeed, the ...”

“... exactly a socialist document. But Orwell saw himself as a man who had taken up politics like a cross, because the necessities of his time compelled him to, and his critics have followed him in that myth. He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate ...”

“... were fed by popular writers such as Charles Kingsley and the historian and travel writer James Anthony Froude, with his daredevil adventures of Hawkins, Raleigh and Drake, who entertained the notion that slavery was something which must be allowed to die away gradually. Africans were ‘children of darkness’, the English a race born to govern. The ...”

“... lento movement is underpinned by pizzicati in a way that fleetingly evokes light-music classics by Anthony Collins (a notable conductor of Façade), Trevor Duncan or Ernest Tomlinson. In a sense (an uncharitable one) Walton is the greatest British composer of light music, transforming it at will but retaining its immediacy in a surprising variety of ...”

“... airy and vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasising how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run of the Arrow, the passion ...”

“... to slam ‘platitudes about the disappointment of sequels’ in defence of the Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope. A fourth, citing the same passage, asks ‘disappointing for whom?’, while proceeding to explain that the ‘general reading public’ has been eager to ‘gobble up’ sequels and spin-offs to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. The ...”