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“... pure’ and so on. Among her appealing period snapshots are notes on a visit to the poet laureate, John Masefield, ‘an absolute poppet’ whose dining room was so cold that she stopped for a double rum on the way home. And here and there you can see her sharpening her ideas in unlikely places. Her notion of a style ‘which makes its impact a fraction later ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of Johns Hopkins University. They were trying to find a method of keeping human cells dividing in a culture outside the body and had turned to cancer cells for their ability to divide essentially unchecked. These particular cells, named HeLa ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins (1991), which quotes Gaze quoting Williams-Ellis, or perhaps one of the countless other ...”

“... is shattered, even pain stops. I am free.’ Wolf has said of writing that it is ‘an attempt to ward off the cold’: but it is only an attempt, and the cold is never far away from the reader of this cogent and impressive ...”

“... Vi had contracted as a child after being sent to hospital with measles and put in an isolation ward with scarlet fever patients. Why there? ‘Because there were no doctors on duty to examine her. They were all off playing cricket.’ The tragedy was dealt with as most tragedies were dealt with in English middle-class homes at that time: no one talked ...”

“... since my arrival five years before, had served as consulting-room cum laboratory and maternity ward. The fathers were feverishly drawing up blueprints; Edith, my wife, was typing orders. I was ordering equipment; we would have electricity. Nobody had much time to devote to our guest. In the morning Greene would walk through the meadow to the banks of the ...”

“... is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.’ Wages must be kept low to ward off what economic historians termed the ‘leisure preference’ and workers called Saint Monday (it extended, some claimed, to Saint Tuesday). Early modern historians seldom pay homage to Tawney; his preoccupations seem out of step with the contemporary ...”

“... was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these ...”

“... commanders, he was allowed to assume the style of ‘viscount’, a title which belonged to his ward. In the English ranks, there were murmurs that Charles was overpromoted. But already his survival skills were evident. His very lack of political acumen, his absence of ambition, took him out of the front line of faction fighting. He was not subtle, so ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... Beauchamp’s Career, Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Mann’s Magic Mountain and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, characters sit around and converse about – precisely – the issues which are exercising similar figures in the real world. Indeed, to debate issues is made their main activity, and the only reason the author has brought them into being. Here is the ...”