“... keepers of the flame, while pocketing the revenue for the estate, have no intention of satisfying. Michael Millgate has – quite fortuitously – written a book on exactly the same subject as Ian Hamilton, using the same case-study method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... of Utopian designs. One late 19th-century approach, exemplified by Ruskin in his Guild of St George and by William Morris in his News from Nowhere, sought salvation in a world of rustic, artsy-craftsy, thatched and timbered, anti-machine socialism: ‘small is beautiful’ before its time. Another, more pragmatic coterie, presided over by Ebenezer Howard ...”

“... In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo. It’s hard to tell from this poem, published when Oppen was in his mid-fifties, or from any of his poems, what words he was thinking of ...”

“... story, which he tells again in My Last Breath. There is a dinner in Buñuel’s honour at George Cukor’s house in Hollywood in 1972. Fifteen famous directors are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to ...”

“... Yet it is only the two and a half years from July 1914 to Asquith’s fall in December 1916 that Michael and Eleanor Brock have chosen to publish. Even within this period, they tell us, they have excluded most of her musings on her family, as well as lists of many of the guests she entertained so frenetically. On the other hand, the book is plumped out by ...”

“... as the ‘convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George Painter’ suggest, and it reaches out to a universe far more varied than ‘the thin thread of Proust’s biography’. These are fighting words in our biographical days, but the reminder is more than timely. What we miss if we collapse Balbec into ...”

“... consulted in 1597 (when she thought herself pregnant by a neighbouring mercer, Henry Wood), and of George Wilkins, the violent brothel-keeper-turned-author with whom Shakespeare cowrote his most innocent play, Pericles, and with whom the hapless Mary Belott née Mountjoy lodged for a while after her marriage. A.L. Rowse wrote about Forman in the 1970s (though ...”

“... and always attentive to the chance that superstition might contain its portion of truth. George Santayana, James’s student and colleague, said ‘he gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . Thus William James became the friend and helper of those ...”

“... of the worst. He dislikes scarcely any of his characters, and a comparison with Jane Austen and George Eliot, from whom he learned so much, is instructive. They are both quite withering about figures they disapprove of. James has a few such figures – in The Ivory Tower, the socialite Gussie Bradham is one. But generally, and especially in his late ...”

“... Of the two​ folk-myths bound up with Englishness, the myth of St George and the myth of Robin Hood, the myth of St George is simpler. Robin Hood is a process; St George is an event. Robin Hood steals from the rich, which is difficult, to give to the poor, which is trickier still, and has to keep on doing it over and over; but St George kills the dragon, and that’s it ...”

“... I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions ...”

“... into the void and so on. Despite a few false notes (the tacky little flags on the bagpipes, and George W. Bush reciting from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost five sons in the Civil War, once again opportunistically figuring the deaths of unknowing civilians as military heroism), the opening ceremony on Sunday, 11 September had gone ...”

“... Taylor. Duncan-Jones, threading her way carefully back through the marginalia of the historian George Vertue into the theatrical networks of Shakespeare’s day has solved the mystery beyond reasonable doubt. Jo: Taylor was Joseph Taylor, a relatively well documented actor. This is a major discovery, but the appearance of Duncan-Jones’s book did not make ...”

“... been made since then to get Parliament to vote for the dismissal of a senior judge. In 1924 the MP George Lansbury put down (but eventually withdrew) a motion for the dismissal of Mr Justice McCardie, who had told a libel jury that General Dyer had acted rightly in firing on an unarmed crowd in Amritsar. More menacingly, over 180 Labour MPs signed a motion in ...”