“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and ...”

“... teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings of admirable against deplorable texts: John Clare compared with ‘a film song’; Mark Twain versus a shampoo advertisement; but also Donne versus Shelley. Because he founded his literary criticism on social criticism, deploring the effects of industrialisation in the 19th century and commodity ...”

“... character’ of language. That phrase comes in the title of a deeply representative book by John Wilkins. It is altogether fitting that a leading figure in the Royal Society should have been preoccupied by such inquiries. One recalls that in the Grand Academy of Lagado the mechanical operation of words figures more largely than experiments with mice ...”

“... own essay in defence of Kipling. Hitchens lines up the most formidable detractors (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Conor Cruise O’Brien), quotes them fairly and at length, and then demolishes them. He even follows Orwell’s injunction that a writer should be particularly severe with the work of his friends (in this case, Said). After that he has the ...”

“... and a few dons. It’s sentimental, don’t you know? and neither Hill, nor Thompson, plodding Williams or doggy Foot can swing the people. Whoever’s heard of Despard, Plug, or Captain Ludd? – dumped in Burford Churchyard bee thoi oll. No, we must lie down and let the Tebbit knock us through the ground. He’s got the goods, as Clive would say – the ...”

“... not a civil one, however, and carries a term of imprisonment.The Conservative minister Lady Williams told the House of Lords that these provisions were aimed at ‘the sorts of tactic we saw from Insulate Britain last autumn’ (when they blocked the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she ...”

“... unimpeded, in particular, by other people. Some thinkers, such as Hobbes and, some of the time, John Stuart Mill, think that this is the conception of freedom, and that it contains all that one knows or needs to know about its value. But this is to identify the seed and the plant, or the rhythm and the dance; it does not get us very far in answering ...”

“... incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...”

“... off far better than the single excursion beyond letters. In this batch it is the excellence of John Barrell’s Poetry, Language and Politics which stands out, providing some compensatory cover for the shortcomings of its companion volumes. Barrell’s fine study of language and power in English poetry takes issue with the enduring assumptions of ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... as well as a host of lesser figures, some of whom were novelists. In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams the era produced a novel of ideas that not only did without a conventional love story, but broached issues relating the individual to the state on a scale of generality that is positively Dostoevskian. Caleb ...”

“... always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ‘natural’ images. But there is some force in Alastair Fowler’s counter-argument that Jonson’s poem, far from excluding labour, helped to pioneer in England a Georgic ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”