“... of his father. One is moved to protest that Sir Gawain is not, in the poem, an adolescent. The Knights of the Round Table are young, as they almost always are in romances, but the hero’s very first speech, when he offers to take on the adventure, displays a self-possession which seems anything but adolescent. Indeed, he is less self-possessed at the end ...”

“... that status? Can we, in short, really see duelling as a by-product of aristocratic dominance, as a mark of caste? Victor Kiernan’s answer in this intriguing and invariably well-written book is an emphatic and unsurprising yes. Kiernan is both a Marxist and a student of Antonio Gramsci. Like the majority of British historians who take even a remotely radical ...”

“... were successful; the struggle for Irish Home Rule was not, with lasting consequences. So, one mark of Britain’s relative political stability in the second half of the 20th century and beyond is the fact that for decades the constitution wasn’t much in the news. Yet there has been, along the way, some ‘radical’ constitutional reform, including the ...”

“... cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of ...”

“... eyes and rejoice in all they have in common, de la Mare’s enchanted world of fairies and knights and flowers, of music and dreams and magic, of childhood and animals and ghosts, of travellers and decaying gardens and abandoned houses, is best understood as an escape from all that science would bring to our attention. While contemporaries such as ...”

“... endowed Price with Williams’s own unmistakable features. That now seems painfully close to the mark. In the novel, Price was shown dying from a series of strokes. On 26 January, Williams suffered a fatal heartattack. Thinking over his death, I am not reminded of his most obvious predecessors in ‘Cambridge English’. Perversely perhaps, I recall instead ...”

“... or invite comparison. The beginning of ‘The Girl in the Cathedral’, especially Princes and Knights still dressed for wars as dim As bronze, slim feet at rest upon the flanks Of long-unwhistled hounds, shares some details with the opening of ‘An Arundel Tomb’. The poems quickly diverge, but Rumens’s meditation on a ten-year-old girl who died in ...”

“... We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant – and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side,’ H.L. Mencken wrote of his fellow Americans. ‘We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty – and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights ...”

“... Martin Luther King Jr and Coca-Cola. Seen through Rutheiser’s ironic, cold eye these nodes mark the fault lines of a disintegrative urban history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the ...”

“... Lloyd-Georgian or Mosleyite) recovery programme were the prejudice and ignorance of the Treasury knights, who, again in Macmillan’s words, ‘see the error which may be committed by doing something, and therefore...say “let us commit the crowning error of not doing anything at all.” ’ Of course, even in 1935 public expenditure was hardly a negligible ...”

“... the battle of Amiens, at the very end of the war, that the tank finally came into its own. The Mark IV and Mark V models were vastly improved in comfort, mobility, armour and firepower. Ahead lay a host of developments in many other countries, as the tank became the classic 20th-century land weapon. But for it to succeed ...”

“... Sir Bernard hates Brian Redhead of the Today programme, which he regards as subversive, hates Mark Lawson of the Independent, whom he describes as a ‘bearded hulk’ and ticks off for appearing at 10 Downing Street in an anorak and boots. And of course he hates the Mirror and the Guardian. Sir Bernard hates all these journalists and papers chiefly ...”

“... through every gambit. In chess notation a particularly good move is signalled by an exclamation mark, a move of genius by two: ‘Bxf4!!’ When Russell talked me through games he would show these notations by a series of clenched fists. He had, apparently, just returned from America, and came straight from the airport, with a tiny bag as his only ...”

“... an Elephant (1903). Still, Edison pales beside Hank Morgan, the time-travelling protagonist of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), who wages modern American war on the cream of medieval European chivalry. The final battle takes place outside the cave to which Morgan and his handful of followers have retreated. Wire fences ...”

“... had kicked the book across the room. Like Leavis’s erstwhile friend and Scrutiny co-editor L.C. Knights, Richards was snubbed on his return to Cambridge in much later life. Knights had ‘ratted’. Richards dared to write congratulating Leavis on his CH (‘Dead Sea fruit’, said his wife). Boris Ford was accused of ...”