“... His critics have responded in both ways, and sometimes in both ways at once – thereby, as Geoffrey Elton put it, ‘maintaining the difficult position that on the one hand the thesis only spells out what they have always said, while on the other it is not true.’ There is, in fact, something to be said for both complaints, though hardly enough to ...”

“... affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke. In 1984 one would just say,‘Oh, you mean he’s a man,’ and have done with it. But in 1971 the beast was less plain, the part harder to define, and ...”

“... reputation of Bagehot’s writings owed rather little to his role as editor and, conversely, the best-known of those writings were not representative of the paper’s contents. Indeed, when Bagehot himself wanted to write at length about the large questions that exercised the Victorian intellectual elite he did so in the pages of major cultural journals such ...”

“... in January 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year ...”

“... which has provided a basis for Patrick Cockburn’s narrative. In reality, the Week’s best sources for cabinet disputes, private conference sessions or appeasement plotting at the Astors’ mansion were dissident politicians and foreign diplomats, who were often told things concealed from the British public.Like George Orwell and several other ...”

“... but rather dismissive reviews by other people. Anyway I was intrigued by this play, and liked it best of all those put on during the festival – and said so in my radio report. But I’d left the proceedings early in order to write the piece; I hadn’t stayed to hear the commanding officer of the Second Tactical Air Force, who was giving the prize to some ...”

“... of course, which of one’s resistances are temptations in disguised form. Psychoanalysis, at its best, reveals one’s repressed repertoire of untaken and alluring risks; and so reveals what one is tempted to resist, and why, in desperation, one might need to turn a resistance into a phobia, which never feels remotely like a resistance, but feels, to the ...”

“... literary hats, but sub-Spenserian pastorals were definitely not his scene: the emblem-writer Geoffrey Whitney is a more likely candidate. Another valuable essay is contributed by Spenser’s biographer Andrew Hadfield, though not on Spenser himself, who has no particular connection with Shakespeare (the idea that ‘pleasant Willy’ in The Tears of the ...”

“... about some forms of philistinism. It puts tough literary minds on their mettle, say, and gets the best out of gentler characters who might want to entertain but would hardly venture on ‘Art’. Amis is listed by Hugh Kenner as an example of the post-(Second-World-) War trough in the English arts, a case of ‘anarchic energies ... there to draw ...”

“... licence to distinguish him from those who are National Socialists out of conviction. The historian Geoffrey Barraclough pointed out, long ago, that Hitler’s was Germany’s first genuine bourgeois revolution. So, perhaps it’s a matter of class?The reason, Martin-Heinz Douglas Freiherr von Bora, is that you are all that we’re striving to leave behind, the ...”

“... perfected their skills in duplicity – ‘love and kisses’ – but they were giving it their best shot. Shortly, secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain would hone the arts of lying. Thompson died in early June, but it wasn’t until 21 September that the family got official news that he was ‘missing, believed killed’. His mother had ...”

“... but they seem terribly real. Two qualities, in particular, serve to distinguish him from even the best historians writing today: his frontal assault on the subject and his bathetic asides. He begins the section on Greek civilisation with a discussion of what the Greeks looked like. Clearly Greek sculpture does not represent your average Greek; yet, ‘a ...”

“... on Pope Rogers follows analytical procedures similar to those of such earlier close-readers as Geoffrey Tillotson and W.K. Wimsatt. When discussing method in the Preface, he declares that ‘doctrinaire method should properly bend before the primacy of the text.’ He gives close, revealing attention to syntax, to hidden numerical symmetries in the ...”

“... is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling he declares in one of his best-known poems, ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’. Although Graves only began formulating his Muse theories in the mid-Forties, the ‘one story’ of his vocation dominates his entire career. Graves’s ‘poetic principles’ involve a wholesale rejection ...”

“... in East Grinstead; and, with his experiences still fresh in his mind, Hillary wrote his wartime best-seller, The Last Enemy. He wrote much of it in America, where he had gone in the hope of being instrumental in persuading the Americans to come into the war. In this he failed, as it was felt in official circles that the sight of his raw and patched face and ...”