“... as a senior academic, teacher and writer. Writing about Carter’s biography in the TLS, George Steiner says that Blunt ‘risked or courted exposure at almost every point; sexual, political and, it may be, in one or two instances, professional’. This is unconvincing. Everyone who knew anything about Blunt knew that he was homosexual, something he ...”

“... Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a year later was writing in these sophisticated terms of his own literary strengths and weaknesses: I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant ...”

“... hunting and gathering of what is already there. When he offers this report to the Governor, Sir George Bowen, the latter’s incomprehension is meant, it seems, to illustrate another aspect of the settler failure to come to terms with the true inner reality of Australia. The exact nature of the potential ‘native’ vegetable-and meat-supply is not spelled ...”

“... like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget 515: Lucas Salik, Anne ...”

“... added many details of considerable interest, leading to a reassessment of the men involved. Though George Buchanan, the British ambassador at Petrograd, refused to intervene directly between Kerensky and Kornilov, local British military officers moved into the diplomatic void: Commander Locker-Lampson (the author has the details from the Commander’s ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... had in the later grail romances been borne by Galahad). Spenser names him by his true name, St George, only when an impostor has taken his shape, and George does not himself find out who he is until he learns his name from Contemplation, inward knowledge in the sight of God. Allegorical romance, as this poem is, can make ...”

“... no. 45 of his periodical the North Briton, Wilkes attacked the effrontery of the prime minister, George Grenville, in obliging the king to speak in praise of a shameful treaty, though in fact the sentiments in the speech were well known to be those of George III himself. Where the speech expressed the hope that a spirit of ...”

“... In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of discipline. ‘Guess which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History ...”

“... very funny. ‘Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.’ George Moore ‘is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty’. Wells ‘is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow.’ As for arguing, Chesterton and Shaw quarrelled publicly ...”

“... of them. What had happened? In the second volume of his biography of Proust, published in 1965, George Painter referred to ‘fragments of a lost novel’. In his 1996 biography Jean-Yves Tadié spoke of ‘75 pages currently missing’. The manuscripts were not in the collection of papers that went to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1962, or indeed anywhere ...”

“... stagnated. There had been a time when it was a party of ideas and ideals – owing more to Henry George than to Marx – but its leaders had long since ceased to believe in either the practicality or the desirability of socialism, and, depressed by the ease with which Menzies won successive elections, did not bother to search for anything to put in its ...”

“... for it. I’m thinking especially of the priest Carel Fisher in The Time of the Angels (1966), George McCaffrey, the title character in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), and almost all the bewitched figures in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). I imagine Murdoch would not want us to linger too long on the low-key allusion to a novel by Sartre in the ...”

“... an auction of rare books from the library of his early mentor and subsequent longtime antagonist George Steevens, against whom he was still planning a full-scale polemic, even though Steevens had by then been dead for two years. On the death of his fellow editor Isaac Reed five years later he solemnly declared: ‘I am the last of the Shakspearians.’ There ...”

“... with the DNB’, ‘Dissenters and “Antiquity” ’ and ‘Disaffection of the Dissenters under George III’. The book adds up to the biography of a lost strain of English thought, lost not because it has been ignored but because it has been flattened, because we have learned to treat Dissent as if we knew what it was – either because we celebrate it as ...”