“... James Stewart, earl of Moray, was shot in 1570, followed by his second regent, his grandfather Matthew Stewart, earl of Lennox, in 1571. A five-year-old James apparently saw him bleeding to death. When James was eleven, Stirling Castle was raided by Catholic rebels. At sixteen, he was kidnapped by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, and imprisoned for ten ...”

“... enquiry that delicate dimension of subjectivity so damagingly expelled by Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer. What has happened by the time Eliot springs on the scene is that knowledge has drifted dangerously loose from its emotional moorings, threatening a crisis of ideological faith. There had been, once upon a time, a discourse which both explained to ...”

“... the impress of this cultural iconoclasm. The penultimate piece in Imaginary Homelands is his 1990 Herbert Read Memorial Lecture. Its title, ‘Is nothing sacred?’, indicates a credo which is widely shared amongst contemporary writers and academics; one example is Angela Carter’s declaration that ‘In the pursuit of magnificence, nothing is ...”

“... acknowledges the assistance of others, notably the editor of the Gladstone diaries, H.C.G. Matthew, Jenkins has extended himself formidably over seven hundred pages, displaying a sure grasp of a mass of baffling detail. He is the first biographer to draw on all 13 fat volumes of the published edition of the diaries: an incomparable source which he ...”

“... and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in Southwark, as well as Crilly’s recent trial on a political charge, all become intensely present, so that a hasty scrawl in a London editor’s ...”

“... duties – Griffiths published only a monograph about Victorian poetry and, in collaboration with Matthew Reynolds, an anthology of English translations of Dante. This was not an output to impress today’s REF bureaucrats. His thinking, and his efforts to describe the intricate working of literary texts, was largely contained in his lectures. Now Freya ...”

“... this way of thinking. Fire and brimstone evangelists like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and overshadowed by ...”

“... and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used ...”

“... muddy tones, they peered out from behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these ...”

“... criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More important, Kaufmann gives too little consideration to the difference between top-down initiatives – the celebration of diversity in advertising ...”

“... Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only non-representational painting, abstract sculpture and asymmetrical and undecorated architecture are illustrated. The names on the cover show native troops stiffened by a ...”

“... up by the literary world – a friend of Nicolsons, Lehmanns and Woolfs, who lunched with Eliot, Herbert Read and Lady Ottoline Morrell, and a reviewer in the leading journals. A pamphlet, Twenty Poems, had appeared to much acclaim in 1930, and three years later Poems was published by Faber to strikingly good reviews. ‘Another Shelley speaks in these ...”

“... it is a deficiency that the collection should lack certain of the most important early sources: Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness (1780), John Broughton’s edition of the Miscellanies in Verse and Prose; by Thomas Chatterton (1778) as well as the books by Dr Jeremiah Milles and Jacob Bryant. In these (often amazing) Early Sources and Responses, the oddly ...”

“... separate edition of the memoirs not yet mentioned: the selection of Memoirs and Portraits made by Matthew Hodgart in 1963. Brooke never once refers to this excellent sampling, the first to use some of the new materials assembled by W.S. Lewis. Almost every truly significant passage or sustained characterisation in the George II memoirs is represented in ...”

“... who shaped ‘the mood of their age’: inter alia, Carlyle, Ruskin, Cardinal Manning and Matthew Arnold. They’re here because, as Dicey saw, they are identified with a collectivist turn in Victorian thinking. All four, along with Mill, were in Marquand’s phrase ‘custodians of the public conscience’. Keynes is a friend for obvious reasons, and ...”