“... of suburban life is an old one. In a famous study of a 1950s Pennsylvania suburb, the sociologist Herbert Gans found that the urban elite looked on ‘the lower middle and working class with whom I lived in Levittown as an uneducated, gullible, petty “mass” which rejects the culture that would make it fully human, the “good government” that would ...”

“... picture of a life and a time. The position of the author in an autobiography is an interesting matter, to which Strong has clearly given no thought at all. He is the hero of his own life and all people and events are assessed in terms of their importance to him. From his birth weight (just over eight pounds) to his hair, which is still ‘abundant’ at ...”

“... the world at large will obey this call to give up looking for the life in the work is another matter. Some, of course, are already persuaded. Colin Burrow scrupulously resisted biographical readings in his 2002 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, and, reviewing Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) in the ...”

“... be handled with care. Words and meanings aren’t things that can be fused together, or for that matter split apart. Writing can give us a sense of language being rammed up against reality, as in Hamlet’s ‘Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, or it can seem to cut loose from the world, as a lot of Shelley does, but these spatial ...”

“... was the rejection of orthogonal geometry and of symmetry, which are authoritarian properties no matter what idiom or polity incorporates them: the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Sens, Beauvais and Troyes are doucer than they would be if whole. They carry the germ of ruination and, hence, of the picturesque, a deathless mode which the cravenly francophile ...”

“... as a teaching subject in the universities, was relegated to the junior schools, as a picturesque matter for projects rather than a testing ground for analytic skills or a source of serious knowledge. The new methods of teacher-training instituted in the Sixties may also have helped to make historians uncertain about their subject. Under the PGCE, the ...”

“... of both worlds and offended all parties, including himself.’ The view that the Peelite Sidney Herbert, had he lived, might have later emerged as leader of the Liberal Party instead of Gladstone ‘is hardly more plausible than the view that Oliver Stanley, a somewhat similar figure who died in somewhat similar circumstances in 1952, would have frustrated ...”

“... dramas on Biblical themes. In the first half of the 17th century most major English poets – Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley – were bilingual in English and Latin, and the few who weren’t bilingual could jog out a few elegiacs for their friends. Something went horribly wrong with this tradition of writing. By the early 20th century ...”

“... his duty by Him, and no more. There is never a hint of that divine enchantment which we get in Herbert or Kilvert, or, though a little on the dreadful side, in Hardy. Woodforde does a few good things which we might resuscitate, such as always having six poor people at his table for Christmas, but he can’t be called holy. When you live unmarried with a ...”

“... the society he lives in has almost killed off the capacity for social ‘mutation’. But, as a matter of fact, he himself is a mutation. Citizen Ken is one of the first known examples of a new strain of politician entirely resistant to all known forms of media poison. The last ten years have brought campaigns against the personal and public lives of ...”

“... colloquialisms, the jokes that – Dickens-style – become irresistible when the subject matter is at its most sombre. (Almost alone among 19th-century novelists, Dickens is quoted with admiration by this novel-averse critic.) The much shorter sections on Browning, in contrast, have some of the verve of the lectures, as Griffiths sets out to show how ...”

“... to what Klinenberg calls the ‘social production of isolation’. In one footnote he quotes Herbert Gans saying that ‘the six bestselling sociology books in the United States are, in order, The Lonely Crowd, Tally’s Corner, Pursuit of Loneliness, Fall of Public Man, Blaming the Victim and Habits of the Heart. Of these, only Blaming the Victim does ...”

“... could be Labour leader, let alone prime minister. Hugh Dalton called him ‘a little mouse’, and Herbert Morrison endlessly intrigued to displace him. As for Attlee himself, he was always extremely modest about his talents. Of the times he was forced to stand in for Churchill during the war he would write: ‘It is no use trying to stretch the bow of ...”

“... the cosmopolitan upper echelon of merchant banks, everybody knew everybody else and business was a matter of mutual trust, mutual favours and mutual insurance. Mavericks were checked by the gold sovereign, which was an unbreachable barrier against currency speculation, and by the governor of the Bank of England, who kept monetary policy tight. The big-time ...”

“... and better-written histories of New Orleans – Grace Elizabeth King’s A History of Louisiana, Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter, and The New Orleans City Guide and Gumbo Ya-Ya (both compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project). The next chapter may belong to geographers. As Powell points out, New Orleans is situated on some of the youngest land on the ...”