“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another reference: And there ...”

“... itself. That this was not an airy theoretical vision but something profoundly fell as well as a matter of necessary quotidian practice is shown by Vogt in passages like the following, written by Wagner in 1851, while at work on ‘Young Siegfried’, the germ from which The Ring of the Nibelung gradually emerged:My daily routine is now as ...”

“... critical life they have taken on. The sonnets are, editorially and bibliographically, another matter entirely. They were, to begin with, not a book. At least some of them circulated initially in manuscript – the miscellaneous writer Francis Meres in 1598 praises Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’, and while it is difficult ...”

“... quotes Wodehouse’s editor at Vanity Fair who remembered him as ‘self-effacing, slow-witted and matter of fact . . . I never heard him utter a clever, let alone a brilliant, remark.’ Wodehouse shows signs of impatience with this convention in The Code of the Woosters (1938) where Bertie drops some of his best witticisms to Jeeves: ‘It’s no use ...”

“... many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a via media between the ...”

“... Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions. On the Whig ...”

“... want anyway). ‘Oh, grumble, grumble,’ says R.15 October. The Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, has died. I met him only once in July 1974 when I had to do a Kilvert recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton. He was charming and easy but it didn’t go well for all sorts of reasons, some sad, some comic. The evening was to have been introduced by ...”

“... fictions. Few practitioners of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves ...”

“... of man hours’; there was always too much of it and the author of ‘every letter received’, no matter how reverential, had to be ‘checked out in the FBI’s central files’. But it was only to be expected that Hoover would be more popular than any president he served under, or any politician who might have checked his power in Congress. He was said to ...”