“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with his ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... the dominant figures are far removed from the Methodism, or the cultural critique of Ruskin and Morris, that was once the ethical basis of the Labour movement. What of the anti-revolutionaries? Neo-liberals are not particularly concerned to beat down the legacies of 1789 and 1848, and they view even 1917 with equanimity, given their faith in the power of ...”

“... like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed at the Walker colliery. The extended network of cousins and relatives by marriage (a number of whom were the ...”

“... Parliament, they bellowed ‘Go back to Jamaica’ and were much admired in the suburbs for their John Bull spirit. The Communist Party, which was strong on the docks in those times and had the famous Jack Dash as its hate-figure, took the day off and later tried to organise a conciliatory East End meeting addressed by the concerned priesthood. But this is to ...”

“... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring ...”

“... available for free) to credulous operatives from the Stasi and the KGB; finally Robert Morris, a genuine sorcerer’s apprentice who more or less accidentally more or less shut down North America. I call in at the newest local arcade for a fix and update. And find an oddly-slanted world-view with gigabytes lavished on witless graphics, millions of ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... the Northern Line I would agree with that.’ The case was thrown out because the judge, Gwyn Morris, had serious concerns about the conduct of Ridgewell’s squad (‘I find it terrible,’ he said, ‘that here in London people using public transport should be pounced on by police officers without a word’). He told the defendants that ‘this case was ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... was a sister-in-law of Burne-Jones and aunt of Rudyard Kipling. From Burne-Jones and William Morris, a family friend, her husband commissioned work; from Kipling her son derived a touch of literary inspiration and even an occasional helping hand with his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir ...”

“... mistake is not the collection of paintings by her daughter Pegeen, nor those by Victor Brauner or Morris Hirschfield: it is Picasso’s very famous La Baignade of 1937, in which two Cubist robots bend over a toy boat, a painting which almost seems to have been designed to discredit Cubism by showing that even its austere language can be pointlessly grotesque ...”

“... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...”

“... private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it ...”

“... who prune flesh and foliage more or less indiscriminately. Mirbeau, the William Morris of death by a thousand cuts, meant his descriptions of the array of minutely calibrated torture devices to provide a critique of Western military technology and its bureaucratisation of death. That Fu Manchu, who seems to have read Mirbeau ...”