“... euphemisms for ‘Communist’. They attained their apogee in the 1948 third party campaign of Henry Wallace, an operation managed by ‘very, very progressive people’. Not only the threat of Soviet rivalry but the emergence of facts about Stalin’s tyranny destroyed a mood of comity based on expediency and fiction. Another circumstance was no less ...”

“... from theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least, from the authors’ own performances. In St Aubyn’s world, the upper classes are both as unpleasant and as clever as ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work ...”

“... few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of ...”

“... Knox could seize on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like ...”

“... turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt ...”

“... in the castle until the persecution subsided.The next century was, if possible, even worse. Henry III, his son Edward I and their enemy Simon de Montfort agreed on little else except the need to get rid of the Jews. De Montfort has clung on to his place in the English pantheon as the prime originator of parliamentary government. His role in murdering ...”

“... of his career he published, either in his sole name or in partnership, Anna Barbauld, Joel Barlow, Thomas Beddoes, William Beckford, William Blake (as an illustrator), S.T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary ...”

“... had heard of Durand, or, indeed, of the two ‘kindred spirits’ – the British-born painter Thomas Cole and the Romantic poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant – whom he depicted contemplating a lushly idealised Catskills landscape of bluffs and waterfalls, their names inscribed like those of lovers on a nearby birch tree. Cole and Durand are ...”

“... Mind (1952), through The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (1965) and the studies of Thomas Mann (1958) and Kafka (1974), to the reviews, essays and lectures now collected as In the Age of Prose, his task has been to make the major achievements of 19th and 20th-century German culture understandable by a British and North American readership. He ...”

“... It became ‘a success with readers before its embrace by critics’, according to its translator, Thomas Bunstead. Some attribute this popular response to its imaginative engagement with technology and mass culture. Others point to its formal adventurousness, or to the influence of a network of literary blogs (centred on Vicente Luis Mora’s Diario de ...”

“... whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la lettre. A ...”

“... for Apartheid), or of a Voltairean Erasmus, a mere dilettante in theological matters, or of a Henry VIII hungry for more and more sex, or of a merely temporising Cranmer or a proto-Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell. How many English men and women in the pew have ever been told from the pulpit or from episcopal or ...”

“... of form and content. Pohl’s approach stands in particularly dramatic contrast to that taken by Thomas Crow, in the opening two-chapter survey of French painting from David to Delacroix. To a much greater extent than any of his collaborators, Crow demands that we look closely and anew at a sequence of major pictures, and appreciate the ideological resonance ...”