“... full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling us that ‘it would be wrong … to imagine that George III is one of those historical personages who from the very start have been particularly unfortunate in the way they have been ...”

“... the capacity to write poetry dried up and left him desolate. What is changed by Booth is chiefly a matter of emphasis: since the public popular affection for Larkin has favoured a less complex version of the poet, one more invested in pathos and consolation than in subversion, Booth insists on the ironic and ambiguous Larkin while granting the case for the ...”

“... memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With words Mum never forgot Dad assured her: “It can’t matter just this once, Eth,”’ a line that Muir and Norden themselves might have written (though in the 1950s it could never have been broadcast). But then so much of Livingstone’s account of his early years catches the mood of the Glums. The Glums were ...”

“... its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds. No matter. The poor farmers and small merchants from the nation’s heartland grasped the essential point: Bryan was challenging a rich, powerful, Eastern establishment in their name. Before the age of microphones, Bryan’s voice reached every cranny of the great ...”

“... accepted Jones’s explanation that the school officials had panicked and prematurely turned the matter over to the police. Since then, in a 2002 essay in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Philip Kuhn has unearthed information which casts doubt on Jones’s innocence. Though charges were only pressed on behalf of two girls, four children he’d examined made ...”

“... tendency to award points to past actors insofar as their thinking anticipated the present. What Herbert Butterfield in 1931 called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ counted as much as a prescription of what historians should avoid as a description of how history had been written in the bad old days. However, Butterfield’s one foray into the history ...”

“... mob working out of the Hotel Florida in Madrid during the siege. Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Virginia Cowles were among that crew, most of them hotly committed to the anti-fascist cause. Gellhorn, with mounting desperation, used her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt to warn of the consequences of ...”

“... writing – she wrote stories on and off till she died – has an Alice in Wonderland matter-of-factness about absurd events, and a fairy-tale insouciance about violence and gore. Her paintings are more inscrutable: the same extraordinary scenes occur but without the (often equally perplexed) narrator to guide us. She didn’t like to question ...”

“... perfect sentences, despite being flustered. The mot juste every time, whether discussing a George Herbert poem or ordering in a restaurant. His voice was deep, his words perfectly enunciated if a little over-emphasised from years of teaching. He spoke briefly and discreetly, and obviously did not enjoy the sort of attention being trained on him and his ...”

“... 1960s, but his relationship with the left was scarred after he refused, unlike his close friend Herbert Marcuse, to support the German university protests of the late 1960s. On one occasion in January 1969, he called the police in to deal with students occupying his seminar room. A few months later, in a packed lecture hall, he was heckled by students ...”

“... them when they run foul of the Federal Constitution. And libel had always been considered a matter for State law. In 170 years the First Amendment had never been held to apply to libel cases. Counsel for the Times in the Supreme Court, Professor Herbert Wechsler of the Columbia Law School, met that challenge of ...”

“... of delivering an intelligible reading of the work’s monumental structure.To Wagner, it was a matter of course that a treatise on conducting should be centred on a detailed consideration of the Ninth. In ‘About Conducting’ and in a later essay – ‘On Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’ – he develops a theory of the art, basing it on his ...”

“... the grave. The polemic extends even to the present reviewer, who was as it happens a pupil of Herbert Butterfield, a principal opponent of Namier, and has spent his life happily engaged in a branch of English history which Namier considered ‘flapdoodle’. On the minor issues between us, Dr O’Brien makes some sound factual points; the larger issue ...”

“... Kenner reveals, ‘had reference to cheese.’ Hard Cheddar, perhaps? The preliminary matters matter, then, but they are seldom simple; they are more often complex and occasionally bewildering in tone and intent, combining as they do effusive thanks and apologies, clawings, back-scratchings, denials, denunciations, and blank statements of disavowal (for ...”

“... who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to Davie’s view less a detraction from their quality than an instance of it. For what he looks for in a Christian ...”