“... could have satisfied, which is why he needed a picture factory and why his collaborators became more or less inspired extensions of his own hand. Van Dyck began his career by learning to be someone else. Sometimes such teamwork is visible, and jars. When Rubens has done the flesh and someone else the fruit, the different ways of showing bloom and shine may ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... Everyone knows this notion of classlessness is false, since nothing stimulates petty snobberies more immediately than a garden. If you have the wrong sort of paving, or if you put swathes of purple and orange together in the misguided belief that you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you ...”

“... part of his induction into the circle) Phibbs and Graves’s wife decided they would rather be a more orthodox duo than part of the ménage. At this, Riding – described by Allen Tate as ‘the maddest woman’ – flipped. When the four of them met to talk things through in April 1929 she threatened suicide unless Phibbs returned to them. Phibbs called her ...”

“... Weale makes an oblique reference to the broadcast of 24 September 1940, but it deserves a more central place in the history of treason. As the Nazis realised, the new communications technology worked in their favour by obliterating national boundaries and blending regional populations into mass audiences. The Workers’ Challenge station was just one ...”

“... moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 Amaco mountain bike (‘with 21 gears, coloured purple and black’) was stolen from a garage at Clingre Farm, Stinchcombe last Saturday. The theft is mentioned on page two and again on page four. This is surely how it should be. West Country ...”

“... intersect; at several points, the arguments are similar. The reasons why one book is so much more productive than the other are mattters of writing, of the self-inscription of each writer in her work, of the legible understandings of the task in hand. One book exists because a highly-regarded writer has visited the domain of a destructive epidemic ...”

“... from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is ...”

“... The seam of her damaged mouth has cultured pearls and ore, veins of copper and gold more valuable, for the poet, than the metals laboriously won from the worked-out mines among which the two children live and play. Although speechless, Pearl is desperate to speak, read and write, praying for St Elmo’s fire up here on the ...”

“... I die?’ Phoned by the Standard, I say the poem’s a dud and the London market’s that bit more bearish. Guiltily, when La Stampa calls, I become altogether a bull. The situation is absurd, like the trade in Westland shares, but as real as that delusion, and another awkward reminder of the values we’ve elected to live by. Fortunately, I’m not the ...”

“... But presumably that is another desired effect in this uneasy novel. As used to be said of Thomas Hardy, Wilson turns his screw of misery once too often. The end of the novel has Giles alone: a Milton, Oedipus or Lear without even a daughter by his side (and Tibba’s devirgination is anyway imminent). Miss Agar has been turned away. The great edition ...”

“... proves that the humour is not ephemeral,’ Arnold Haskell wrote in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... a foxhunting man, he was the least bookish of the leading founders, many of whom were much more deeply immersed in the classics. The selfless Cincinnatus, the reforming Solon, Cicero in his defence of the republican constitution – these were the cynosures of virtuous conduct for the founding generation. Over two centuries later, today’s Americans ...”

“... for weeks. A video of the shooting was also posted on YouTube, where it has been streamed more than a million times. Many concluded after watching the video that the shooting wasn’t a murder, but an execution. Six days after the shooting, a peaceful march in downtown Oakland turned violent. Protesters who had gathered to express their outrage at ...”