“... the instinctual and the imaginative life; in its ‘lower’, and perhaps commoner, forms, there may be little more than abnormal movements and impulsivity, though even here there is an element of strangeness. It was well recognised and extensively reported in the closing years of the last century, for these were years of a spacious neurology which did not ...”

“... more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even included in the massive – if frequently trivial and banal – Contemporary Novelists. He is omitted from surveys of literature (even by those who have praised him). This is certainly undeserved neglect: but could ...”

“... intended, for all your rational revulsion or boredom or disapproval of the outworn ideologies they may sanction. The last dissenting emotion is perhaps the one most frequently aroused at present. Children’s stories from the past are continually disparaged for being insufficiently egalitarian, or wide-ranging, or whatever. Robert Leeson, in Reading and ...”

“... readers that there are no imaginative exits from history. Rereading these lines on a damp day in May, I reflect that Keith Joseph is poised to close down a dozen tutorials on Matthew Arnold and that Holub speaks also to this society. He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must ...”

“... It is a very seductive technique, and not quite like any other in recent writing, however much it may borrow from Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, the Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howards End. It borrows in the sense that the stories and characters deployed are mythological and exemplary, as they are in the American tradition of Hawthorne and ...”

“... the working class held by employers, politicians and the formulators of popular opinion. The first may perhaps be termed the ‘high Tory’ conception of the ‘dangerous classes’ as volatile, irrational, potentially hostile. Strikes here represent latter-day peasants’ revolts, always liable to get out of hand. On this view, effective containment of the ...”

“... Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and finally stormed, unaided, the ‘lair of the fascist beast’, Berlin. This achievement must be considered one of the most extraordinary in military history, for at the outset the Russians were caught completely by surprise and almost completely unprepared ...”

“... any importance in society? We will then be able to say how near Pope came to Juvenal. Meanwhile it may be observed that the poems in question seem to contain no reference to such an approach; also, although Juvenal may well have annoyed some of his contemporaries, he did not employ the name of anyone who was both alive and ...”

“... Dear Britain, Merry Christmas! If I may Presume on your attention for the space Of one broadsheet, I’d simply like to say How pleased I am to see your homely face Perked up and looking forward to the day When even the downcast are kissed by grace – The day a perfect birth is celebrated And we who are imperfect feel elated ...”

“... does not pretend to see the whole period afresh. Indeed, in some respects there are, if one may so put it, fewer surprises than expected. Some of the most perceptive recent work (Tyacke, Collinson and Lamont on religion; Hirst on the electorate; Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter ...”

“... had come out in 1912, F. Münzer’s Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien in 1920. One may doubt, however, whether it has ever been employed more effectively than by Syme, who apart from being a great historian is a considerable literary artist. The mandarin prose of his predecessors had run to long, flowing sentences, suggesting an affinity with ...”

“... prefaces Herbert’s Remains (1652). Johnson must have read Izaak Walton’s Life of Herbert, and may have quoted from it in his 28th Rambler, although he does not seem to have used this particular life in his quotations from Walton in the Dictionary. The Dictionary tells an entirely different story. Here Johnson quotes no less than 120 times from ...”

“... of Berenson’s style of ‘scientific’ analysis, so greatly indebted to Giovanni Morelli, we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is ...”

“... content and moral force that they continue to mark a deep cleavage in Western philosophising. Jung may have meant that we start out as realists or nominalists and follow our assigned destinies. His maxim reaches far beyond that. We are either Plato’s friend or Aristotle’s friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone ...”

“... New English Bible and the Revised English Bible of the 1960s and 1989 respectively. Every age, it may be supposed, gets the translation it deserves: the blandness of these last two attempts seems to bear out the old clerical-donnish joke that only bishops are improved by translation, where Tyndale’s one-man, plain sinewy, supple, lively version belies ...”