“... called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale,’ he wrote in his brilliant book on Thomas Aquinas. In fact – and this is what makes Chesterton so much more delightful a writer than Belloc – everything he wrote was ‘subjective’, everything in his prose, whether it is the poetry of Browning which is being considered or the intellectual ...”

“... order had been restored. Nemesis had followed hubris; crime had received its just punishment. Thomas Mann said it, too: everything must be paid for. Expressions of self-pity were rare. Even before 1945, there were rumblings of guilt. ‘Ja, wir tragen unser Leiden mit Geduld, an der ganzen Scheisse sind wir selber schuld,’ people sang under their ...”

“... sister Everina and her delicate friend Fanny Blood as well, whose marriage to her dilatory suitor Hugh Skeys Wollstonecraft meanwhile actively promoted in the expectation that Skeys would take Fanny to live in Portugal, a climate she hoped might restore her friend to health. Two years later the married Fanny sent word from Lisbon that she was about to have a ...”

“... They sneer at ‘fellows with ideas’ or tell funny stories about Americans or admire Jimmy Thomas. It is all very painful and explains why so many of the young scientists here turn communist. Postan was astonished to find that the medievalists ignored the work of Marc Bloch and none of the lectures on political thought mentioned Marx. Brooke explains ...”

“... Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”

“... illusion, but still ... Here is an account of mama’s supposed mariage blanc to the rich footler Hugh (‘Hughdie’) Auchinloss:I should note that the only advantage for a child in having an alcoholic parent is that you acquire, prematurely, quite a bit of valuable data. Apparently, there was going to be Sex whether Nina liked it or not. She did not like ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... personae and masks took some of its cues from earlier uses of imaginary portraiture. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a Housmanesque figure of sorts, ‘out of key with his time’, just as Housman’s spareness and shiftingness, from poem to poem, connect him to a wider present. But we are rarely given Housman the contemporary: rather a Housman ...”

“... Sitwell enthuses over a song about Havana night life. As late as 1959, the British historian Hugh Thomas recognised that Cuba was one of the few tropical countries to have created a modern culture of its own. He also noticed that Fidel Castro owed his power not to guerrilla warfare, as he had believed before visiting Cuba, but to television. The way ...”

“... many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the ...”

“... 23 May. I’m coming to the end of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s novel, the first of two about Thomas Cromwell. Rich and vivid and teeming with life it’s a monumental work and some, at least, of one’s admiration is for Mantel’s sheer industry. Presented as very much a modern sensibility Cromwell recoils from, or is anxious to avoid, cruelty, a ...”

“... yet also busy sites of literary production were at this date connected facts. In the Shetlands, Hugh MacDiarmid – praised by MacNeice in reviews – had published his Second Hymn to Lenin and would soon write his own prose book on the Scottish islands. In the Hebrides, Sorley MacLean had composed an elegy for MacNeice’s friend John Cornford, ‘marbh ...”

“... such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works that were genuinely meditative as well ...”

“... side’ seems to be partially based on Larsen. Van Vechten has a cameo in both of her novels as Hugh Wentworth, novelist and partygoer. He encouraged Larsen to write, particularly about her experiences as a Black woman. In October 1925, when she quit her job entirely, it was partly in response to his attention. He advised her to capitalise on what Hughes ...”