“... poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused. When we rerun the history in our minds, wishing to find a way to make it all happen differently, it is hard to know whether, for the sake of Keats and ...”

“... A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in May 1756. It was well received and its publisher Robert Dodsley offered 20 guineas for the copyright of the Philosophical Enquiry plus a further ten if it reached a third edition. The offer was accepted and the work was published in April 1757, six weeks after Burke married Nugent’s daughter Jane. He had also ...”

“... in Martha’s hand. She probably read them during the Twenties. The marked-up passages of the keen young high-school pupil offer an unerring foretaste of the mature writer. Underlinings at random, from Fors Clavigera: ‘The chief, and almost the only business of the government, is to take care that no man may live idle.’ ‘And the guilty thieves of ...”

“... resulting in numerous comical episodes. ‘Likely lad’: n. (b) British a working-class young man; a young man with characteristics stereotypically associated with the working class. (OED) Hill has been very well served by the excellent Kenneth Haynes, who saw both his prose and his poetry into the magnificence of ...”

“... a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live in a sort of waking dream.’ When his belief fails, which means when transcendentalism ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’ Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the ...”

“... the Second World War and now St Lucian pig farmer, is obsessed with Helen, the proud and beautiful young woman who used to work as his wife Maud’s maid. He identifies her with her island and tries to discover its ‘true place’ in imperial history. Together, his obsession and research make him neglect Maud and at her death, filled with remorse, he gives ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”

“... a flummery beyond compare, the flummery itself. I take a cab from Gatwick to London driven by a young Indian man who’s about to have an arranged marriage. The Gaelic term for an ‘arranged marriage’ is cleamhnas, and people who’ve had arranged marriages, or are merely related by marriage, are known as clownies, an idea I’m still pondering as I ...”

“... et vituperatio – vituperatio, above all, against contemporary Europe and the ignorance of the young: By what right did Keyes, or my cousin’s Lancaster, or the trapped below-decks watch of Peter’s clangorous old destroyer-escort, serve to enfranchise these strange children pitiless in their ignorance and contempt? Like Matthew Arnold telling the ...”

“... intense awareness and a habit of self-expression have been common in the history of the sport. Robert Graves climbed difficult routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his ...”

“... even more than they feared any form of public anarchy, and such occasions as the incident in which young Ell-wood refused to take off his hat to his father were convenient pegs on which to hang very profound fears of the threat which religious liberty might offer to male supremacy. To those who, like Locke, thought that ‘promises, covenants and oaths ... are ...”

“... them and nothing in the future, with Rogers thinking about living in the USA and his partner John Young looking into minicab driving, the RIBA asked them to submit material for consideration by an unnamed client. Lloyd’s were looking for an architect. They needed, not just space, but a plan which would allow business to go on while building proceeded. At ...”

“... so forth – and Geertz quickly became embroiled in a bitter losing battle to recruit his friend Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, which erupted into the gleefully malicious pages of several national newspapers. (Geertz quotes a ‘particularly enragé mathematician’ telling the director Carl Kaysen that ‘social science will be your ...”