“... satisfyingly inevitable one. In a recent reply to Clementi, the Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (in John Minford’s translation) resists the urge to gloat and tempers anger with ruefulness: That rhapsodic rhetoric of yours   takes the measure of us,   trusses us tight in a wire cage of tradition,   condescends,   strews a little casual scholar’s ink ...”

“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the abbey was very similar: James Turle was the last of the old type, having been organist there for 51 years, starting in ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... the farm workers were now arrested. The Arnells advised her to take on an expensive lawyer named Shaw. (Gordon Selwyn sent back the title deeds of the property so that funds could be raised to pay for the defence, but they were returned since the bank manager thought it best for the accused to have as few assets as possible.) Helen then had a relapse.On 12 ...”

“... pride. As the Irish nation wallowed in its ‘liberation’, a Jesuit priest called Father Francis Shaw submitted an essay to the Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... a telling examination of a stanza from ‘To Anna Kern’ as rendered by Kisch, Newmarch, T.B. Shaw and Bowra. His own version has no difficulty in achieving a more tactful, as well as more literal, fidelity: I remember the moment of wonder: You appeared before me, Like a momentary vision, A spirit of pure beauty. But of Pushkin’s simple grace it has ...”

“... most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian hyperbole. His ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... Those who took a class-based view of things were bewildered and infuriated by the whole business. Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, mocked the contradiction involved in the case of ‘the Tichborne Claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off as a baronet was supported by an association of labourers on the ground that the Tichborne family, in ...”

“... Street’.Admirers of Morris the revolutionary have shared his uncertainties. George Bernard Shaw thought Morris’s late-life addiction to scribbling prose romances a lowering hobby – why not take up making musical instruments instead? When Morris’s former secretary Sydney Cockerell trekked to Yasnaya Polyana, he was disappointed to learn that ...”

“... with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking ...”