“... but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ideals. Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves’s first biographer and a close friend, traces the demonic bloodlust of the White Goddess all the way back to Graves’s cradle: ‘The infant looked up into its mother’s face, and sensed that – without much ambiguity – she ...”

“... supporting Powell’s campaign against black immigrants. In the same month, by neat coincidence, Martin Luther King was shot dead, during his successful campaign for Civil Rights for black American citizens. Other Hitler-like operations in 1968 included, in the military sphere, the hand-to-hand killing of four hundred-odd Vietnamese civilians by Lieutenant ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of Worcester Cathedral, also lately a Benedictine monastery. While abbot of Evesham, Hawford had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at ...”

“... In poetry, drama and fiction, writers followed the new formal rules laid down by the Silesian poet Martin Opitz in his Buch von der Teutschen Poetery (1624) and brought about a national literary revival. They wrote in a vivid and dynamic style, with larger than life characters and supernatural occurrences. But the rhetorical flourishes that worked well for ...”

“... modern society.’ Germany after its defeat in 1918 was a very political place. But Scheler, like Thomas Mann, whose Considerations of an Unpolitical Man caught the mood of many intellectuals in the Weimar years, hated the fact. He despised the interest-mongering in the new parties, disliked the interests themselves, and was contemptuous of the ...”

“... quality, to that of Wonderland, with Arthur as Alice and his big-wig literary friends – Thomas Hardy and Henry James at the Athenaeum – as mad Queens. It seems now that no one could live Benson’s supremely cushioned existence. Apart from occasional guarded forays into London literary society and royal circles, his life was passed from behind ...”

“... by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties with Girls’, written in 1981-82 (a title retained for a quite different novel of 1988, the sequel to Take a Girl like You). One also has to come to the Huntington to read the letters (or many of ...”

“... in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the whole of ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... friends have verified it. Thus, as often happens with US fiction (remember the rumours that Thomas Pynchon was really J.D. Salinger under another name?), attention is deflected away from the substantive matter of the novel, and onto various gee-whizz discussions of supposedly Post-Modernist authorial behaviour – the adult version of the ...”

“... view of the Anglo-Saxon world and by a contemporary pursuit of social and political reform. Thomas Evans, cited by Hallam, wrote in 1816: ‘Our divine institutions, our real constitution, established by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was destroyed by the tyranny of the Norman Conquest. If conquest gives right, and right is the best title to the possession ...”

“... to support the king’s proceedings: those who would not, like Bishop Fisher of Rochester and Thomas More, went to the block, protesting that they died for the Catholic religion. For the king’s marriage had opened Pandora’s box. The pope, that gutless Medici by-blow Clement VII, was in the power of Catherine’s nephew Charles V, whose armies sacked ...”

“... that mention Chaucer than any other premodern poet: 493 of them, meticulously compiled by Martin Crow and Clair Olson in Chaucer Life Records (1966). What they record is the career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk ...”

“... fear and voyeurism that keeps us sitting in the darkened cinema. In homage to Powell’s cameo, Martin Scorsese cast himself in a scene in Taxi Driver, playing a voyeur spying on his adulterous wife from Travis Bickle’s cab. ‘You see the woman in the window? Good. I want you to see that woman ’cause that’s my wife. But that’s not my apartment ...”