“... his time. But if that work made him a household name, it did nothing for his academic reputation: Hugh Trevor-Roper, not Taylor, was appointed regius professor in 1957. Quick to feel slighted, Taylor became ever more populist, and for a time limited his commitments at Oxford in order to direct the Beaverbrook Library. During the 1970s and the early 1980s he ...”

“... thought that they were enlightening the womb, the last preserve of unreason, at least in Europe. Thomas Dawkes’s The Midwife Rightly Instructed (1736), written in dialogue, includes this exchange between a surgeon and a midwife, who has been instructed to remove the placenta manually:MIDW: Well, but Sir, if I do this, I must be obliged immediately to ...”

“... moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the response of present-day common people to the Royal Family has to ...”

“... obligations of citizenship. Normally invisible, traces of it surface in the work of a critic like Hugh Kenner, pillar of the reactionary National Review, who gives equal praise to the joking despair of Beckett and the regimented utopianism of Buckminster Fuller. The alliance, in one form or another, is of long standing. Baudelaire understood its nature more ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”

“... since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ‘the mob of Welshmen who write in Welsh ...’ At any rate, and oddly enough, France – specifically the France of Ronsard, from whom he translates four poems, two ...”

“... the House of Representatives, the precedent evoked is that of 1800, ‘when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes’. The most interesting historical figure in 1876 is Tilden, whose principled refusal to cheat the process (or work it) is viewed by Schuyler with equal measures of respect and impatience. Tilden is one of ...”

“... Silkin’, i.e. the poet Jon Silkin. When The Barracks was adapted for the stage by the playwright Hugh Leonard, McGahern wrote to his US editor: ‘The tart’s name is Hugh Leonard, did Stephen D. once, and several cheap hits.’During these years, McGahern was writing his fourth novel, The Pornographer, in which the ...”

“... To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources ...”

“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... made the more premature by undiagnosed diabetes: Anthony Powell (who used Lambert as a model for Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time), William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van ...”

“... at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh Trevor-Roper has compared, in his vivid re-creation of its effect upon the generation which lived through it, to the 1930s. In politics, Arminianism was essentially a 1620s issue. It remained politically inflammatory in the 1630s, but by then Laud’s ...”

“... British radicals for two centuries – from Paine to Cobden, from Bertrand Russell to Tony Benn. Hugh Cunningham’s The Volunteer Force (1975) clearly revealed the Mid-Victorian popularity of mobilising in national self-defence, and if modern British social historians had been less sympathetic to the Left, or if Conservative historians had been less ...”

“... a filter of experience. Consoling Crosland over the loss of his seat in 1955, the ex-Chancellor Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as ...”

“... accident and lost his right arm.’ In a story called ‘A Game of Chess’ (1965), two brothers, Hugh and Amos, meet for dinner in Chicago. Amos, too, has lost an arm: ‘His left arm, ending in a gloved hand, hung motionless at his side. He had lost his arm as the result of an accident with a shotgun.’ He draws again and again on the same store of ...”