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“... consequences? Bromwich bases most of his analysis of the Right on the writings of George Will and William Bennett, leaders of the ‘reactionary priesthood’ but not exactly intellectual giants. He argues that both clutched so-called traditional values obsessively to their breasts because they believed that only a traditional culture could provide a reliable ...”

“... I first met William Empson fifty years ago, when he was teaching in Japan and I in Singapore. I was rather frightened of him. Only about my own age, he was a great deal more sophisticated and infinitely more intelligent. It was plain that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and in his presence I often felt rather a fool ...”

“... misleads with a profusion of detail and the one that mysatifies with laconic artfulness. The Panda Hunt is a tale at once overtold and undertold, and hence flawed-though it is an engaging book, humorous, lyrical, with a kind of dawdling charm that comes from the blending of comedy and pathos and occasionally something deeper and darker than pathos. It has its ...”

“... self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually intrepid and well-educated woman: it mixes affectionate chat about the Hunts’ children and hers with ...”

“... puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert – and engine driver Hunt’ (Hunt turns out to be a subject, not an author, of light verse, from the pseudonymous ...”

“... of sermons, letters, treatises, anthologies of tales. That accursed rabble of Hellequin’s hunt reflects the clerical grief and disapproval that would lead to the founding of the Christian orders of knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers, in an effort to discipline the Crusades and their Christian militia. ‘We cannot define any better the ...”

“... he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and cultivated a limp, to none of which he was entitled. All this may sound very silly, but war is a great breeder of lies and the young Hemingway was behaving like a lot of other ...”

“... sufficiently knowledgable on the subject, so had chosen a hog farm scout instead. Perhaps Bob’s hunt for Ace is really an oblique dramatisation of Proulx’s quest for a credible protagonist. Traces of Proulx’s original intention remain in the finished novel. Several chapters deal with the lives of Ace and his contemporaries – his dead partner; his ...”

“... As an indication of what’s happening to the Tory Party, the more disturbing sight was of Jeremy Hunt – ostensibly a pragmatist – refusing to rule it out. And so the party’s long descent into ideological madness reaches a new nadir, where a sitting foreign secretary toys with declaring a state of exception, purely to exorcise some imagined European ...”

“... Some of Hazlitt’s early critics used similar turns of phrase when describing his prose. Leigh Hunt felt that ‘his intellectual tact is such/That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,’ while Mary Russell Mitford wrote of his theatre reviews: ‘I could not help reading them altogether; though so much of Hazlitt is rather dangerous to ...”

“... giggle in them of an affectedly self-conscious children’s game: ‘I love to hide and hear ’em hunt.’ Hearing them hunt becomes the poet’s pleasure, and a source of teasing power. For Emily Brontë the passions of Gondal (‘Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers’) carried the arrested detail and pathos of ...”

“... went to a performance at the English Opera House on 29 August, and wrote appreciatively to Leigh Hunt about Cooke’s acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the ...”

“... vestry, a town hall, is remembered and recorded. The work of the architects (Caesar Augustus Long, William Hunt, A.G. Cross) responsible for its development and redevelopment is acknowledged. More recent exploitations of a building denied any proper function since the 1980s are ignored. No notices commemorate ‘Whirlygig’ club nights when New Age ...”

“... not on the poet but the painter that Levi chooses to concentrate. Lear was born in 1812, when Dr William Gilpin’s cult of the picturesque was being vigorously debunked in The Adventures of Doctor Syntax, and the bemused water-colourists who jostled at the viewing-stations in the Lakes had tired of holding up their tinted Claude glasses to reflect and ...”

“... in America, where he soon became part of the literary scene. Among the authors he charmed were William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate and Robert Lowell. How a biographer inflects the story of Ford in the telling will depend on his own moral and aesthetic assumptions. Sympathetic accounts can deal with the lying by polishing up the excuse offered by the author ...”