“... and, in doing so, achieves a querulous irony. Worstward Ho – the title puts us in mind of Charles Kingsley’s stirring adventure yarn, and perhaps of Kipling’s boarding-school, model for Stalky and Co. Shorn of the exclamation-mark which gives a stirring emphasis to the Victorian adventure story (and the name of the Victorian school), Worstward Ho ...”

“... of politics likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three ...”

“... wing beneath, etc. A role Sadie plays as if made for the part: the Nick to Philae’s Gatsby, the Charles to her Sebastian, the Gene to her Finny: there is always the friend, Sadie knows, any freshman who’s done all her reading knows the narrator of the story is always the Friend. (Gene and Finny from A Separate Peace, ‘the wing beneath’ presumably ...”

“... commodity, the table has ceased to be, as Marx puts it, an ‘ordinary, sensuous thing’ made of wood. ‘It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.’ According ...”

“... of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it came to vernacular music, Tippett invariably turned to America. Ragtime jitterbugged through the last movement of his Piano Sonata No. 1, completed as early ...”

“... woods of oak and birch, and water meadows. The floors are oak. A handful of rooms are heated by wood-burning stoves, and it’s sparsely furnished. There aren’t many distractions: no internet, television, computers, phones, radio, electricity. It’s the early 19th century, after all. There’s nobody to talk to. Of course there are hundreds of people ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... painting in four or five of those submitted was rejected. In 1873, however, during the reign of Charles Blanc, more than half did not make it to the wall. Blanc, a critic and art theorist, showed that scandal-fearing politicians were much less dangerous than those, like Blanc, who took schemes for the improvement of art and morals seriously. The Salon ...”

“... to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have it.’ ‘Three weeks to pay, or eject.’ Sometimes: ‘Pay by Wednesday, or ...”

“... memoir-writing by the upper classes, remains first-rate. For much of the volume we are in a remote wood-chopping world, a species of Arcadia – though a far from innocent one – in which earth-shaking events do not intrude. Leacock, it emerges, first became a humorous lecturer to raise funds for the Belgians in 1914, but, apart from that, World War One (in ...”

“... writing. As he would have wished, she puts more of an emphasis on the historical novels – Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had ...”

“... Gauguin as a ‘defender of the savages’. At a subsequent auction, he bought several canvases, wood carvings, some notebooks and Gauguin’s palette, 24 lots in all for 190 francs, or a little less than a month’s pay. This wasn’t a bit of speculative connoisseurship: at the time he seems to have had little interest in the work as such; rather, he was ...”