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“... founding treaty was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian ...”

“... with the authority of experience: the hand that wrote them was permanently blue with indigo. At Thomas Wardle’s factory in Leek, Staffordshire and then at his own workshop at Merton Abbey, Morris fussed over the dye vat, drawing on antiquarian books to revive older and better modes of manufacture. Yet the freedom was his alone. He bullied Wardle’s ...”

“... Park, and is, coincidentally, where Willa Cather also came to summer with her partner, Edith Lewis. Yourcenar and Frick’s white clapboard house with black shutters was surrounded by trees and filled with old things, such as Delft tiles and Indonesian tapestry, as well as hundreds of books arranged by century. From 1951 it was Yourcenar’s permanent ...”

“... my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A ...”

“... a short story for a magazine. It must be smart and ‘gripping’, with stock sentiments (Wyndham Lewis jeered at them heartily, not realising that they were intentional). This is enough reason for it to leave out the detail of the spectacles. Ellmann also reports that he disliked having to wear them, leaving them off at parties apparently, but surely he ...”

“... deliquescence into self-acknowledged shame and failure, and finally into years of silence; Wyndham Lewis, a man of extraordinary abilities, hardly exists now as a writer. Admiring sympathy may make the reader and critic assume, like Kenner, that ‘the culture’ betrayed their talents. Perhaps the most fully achieved and most surviving master of the ...”

“... The small rain down can rain? Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. C.S. Lewis used to say that it was his wife he was thinking of, not his mistress or girlfriend, otherwise he would most likely have written ‘in her bed again’. However that may be, the point is that de la Mare and Stevie Smith and Anon are all appealing to us over ...”

“... made the poet tell a New York audience including Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Sinclair Lewis that ‘a great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Travelling to Paris, Wilson may have believed that liberalism ‘must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilisation is to escape the typhoon’. But secular ...”

“... King and the other ministers and divinity students at the movement’s core. They sound less like Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and more like the early New England Puritans – those children of Israel in the New World – only they plead the case for inclusion rather than exclusion. ‘All Christians are of one body in Christ,’ John ...”

“... regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for near sixty years?’ Given this insight, it was mischievous of Carlyle to go ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”

“... of 39’, but he is not much in evidence as a poet in these nine hundred pages. Writing to Wyndham Lewis in January 1926, he acknowledged that his recently issued Poems 1909-25 would not do much to alter critics’ views of his work: ‘But I wanted to collect all my stuff and get rid of it in one volume so as to get it out of my own way and make a fresh ...”

“... course began skipping about the horizon.’ As ever, Alice, like the girl who shared her name in Lewis Carroll’s novels, relished the possibilities of resistant literalism for its power to take the strange philosophies and practices of others to the brink, from which extremity life began to look impossible, absurd, liveable and funny.Scene ...”

“... were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same ...”

“... Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of ...”