“... together several times, they were seen in the same way, both key figures in determining what Herbert Read called, in Horizon, ‘the fate of modern painting’. John Lehmann used their work to illustrate a volume of Penguin New Writing and Peter Watson, who co-curated the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, chose both of them, along ...”

“... we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have become the masters of our own fate – and ...”

“... had taught him to understand music. Music, to be true to itself, he would later say, must be ‘a matter of life or death’.As a music critic, Keller became known for his thoroughly un-English directness. Radical candour was a point of principle; not to speak his mind was out of the question. Alison Garnham and Susi Woodhouse, surmising that there was never ...”

“... The poor health of soldiers fighting in the Boer War made the state of the nation’s young men a matter of public concern. The blame wasn’t put on urban poverty, however, but on ‘ignorance on the part of mothers of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it. Declining birth rates, rising ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of theatrical taste favouring plays that resemble, in Jonson’s judgment, undesirable organic matter (mould, leftover food, discarded fish). No doubt some mouldy tale, Like Pericles, and stale As the shrieve’s crusts, and nasty as his fish – Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the ...”

“... shuffled off its earlier meaning, with its implications of growth and improvement. In 1864 Herbert Spencer had removed some of the ambiguity of On the Origin of Species by recasting its subtitle ‘The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ as the pithier ‘Survival of the Fittest’. Science declared that there was no ...”

“... Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they ...”

“... determined to hang on to their existing conviction about the peculiarity of the British in this matter, despite an accumulation of doubt-inducing counter-evidence. Some see the claim as further proof of the stultifying grip of a long-established class formation on so many areas of national life, while others delight in the easily comprehensible fretwork of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”