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“... that his story shall have no point beyond itself, it is natural that he should at the end turn to Herbert Butterfield’s essay The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s subject in 1931 was particular, even parochial. He disliked the liberal triumphalism of much of what he read. But put into the lower case and generalised, his argument can be ...”

“... book was noticed. But it also has more solid virtues. After the extended badinage of the prefatory matter, the actual travelogue is delivered in a direct, unfussy style. Jonson hits the right note when he calls Coryate a ‘bold carpenter of words’. Much of the text is practical, indeed statistical (journey times, populations, dimensions of notable ...”

“... America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never ...”

“... They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of intrigue and rivalry among the variegated species of anti-Fascists who failed, in the end, to hold the pass: bourgeois ...”

“... dilemma emerges: how not to destroy the other or others whom I need in order to live. It isn’t a matter of calculating that destroying them would probably be a bad idea. Rather, it is a matter of recognising that dependency fundamentally defines us: it is something I never quite outgrow, no ...”

“... refer to a backdrop of stories. Jones’s wife, we discover, left him for someone called Jones (Herbert); and 11 years after Jones first proposed making his name more opulent Freud was to write to him of someone Jones had enquired about: ‘He may be called Freud; the name is not as rare as one might wish.’ Rarer, though, than Jones. If one of the ...”

“... water jugs upset etc etc has a very small charm.’ The guest responsible for all the mischief was Herbert Gladstone, son of the prime minister, then aged 28 and already Liberal MP for Leeds, a future home secretary and the first governor general of South Africa. The Souls formed themselves in opposition to silliness of this sort, but also to the greater ...”

“... Marxist Social Democratic Federation and engaged in a campaign to organise unskilled workers. With Herbert Burrows, she helped to organise the famous strike of the match-girls at the Bryant and May factory, the first in a sequence of struggles which culminated in the great dock strike and the new unionism of 1889. Later in the year, standing as a candidate for ...”

“... who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You see,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I look down this table at all these distinguished people and think: What am I doing here?’ Same here, but as soon as one loses the sense of being in grand ...”

“... track of a certain idea’. He’s indeed something of a wild man, who once sought (in a book on Herbert) to demonstrate that Jesus was insane, and now offers speculations equally original (whether they will turn out to be originary only time can tell) on Shakespeare, Pope, Swift, Ovid, Virgil and C.S. Lewis. One essay is a piece of straight philological ...”

“... is hopelessly uncritical, and largely derives from the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the time of ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... in words and conversation. It is – ironically, for Burrow is a Cantabridgian – more Young than Herbert Butterfield on the eve of DNA, although the serious examination of a tradition of historical thinking in relation to a national culture is Butterfield; and Burrow would – does – as anyone interested in the history of historical method would – should ...”

“... earnestness rather than a little less. One of the attractions of nonsense poetry both as reading matter and as a subject for critical prose is that it appears to offer a holiday from all that dreary business of worrying about what the poet might be trying to say: centuries before the French Symbolists started going on about it, some English comic verse had ...”

“... PPE examination papers an anxious and ‘with-it’ question asked for elucidation of the sage ‘Herbert Maracuse’. That was good for a chuckle. But it wasn’t all doddering and quavering: Home Secretary Callaghan, that red-faced beadle, knew his stern duty. All the Fleet Street rags, the day after Grosvenor Square, printed a leering pic of a girl ...”