“... 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 ...”

“... of war crimes against US servicemen, was found to have been studying the problem since July – as best I can make out from Conot, as an act of bureaucratic free enterprise suggested to him by a colonel in the Civil Affairs Division. By mid-September Bernays submitted a six-page scheme, the essential idea of which was to try, on a charge of conspiracy, not ...”

“... pope, who was supreme in the land. Much of the material was drawn from the fanciful romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose ‘Arthurian fables’, to quote Diarmaid MacCulloch in his Life of Cranmer, ‘have met their nemesis in Walt Disney and Monty Python’. The king lapped it all up, and now so do the Jacob Rees-Moggs and Iain Duncan-Smiths, whose ...”

“... vestiges, survivors from another time. He argues that, on the contrary, ‘hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys – slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare’. Central to the ...”

“... Many of her critics used the misogynistic vocabulary of frigidity against both her and her work, Geoffrey Grigson being particularly obnoxious in attacking the imagery in her poems as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and ...”

“... not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked ...”

“... a 20th-century construction, put forward especially strongly in the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army ...”

“... letter ever written by an English author about his work’. Tracing the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the dipsomaniac British consul in Mexico, as he grapples with and succumbs to his mescal addiction, Under the Volcano is not only a baroque study of terminal delirium but a tormented, brilliant and often grimly comic appreciation of the human ...”

“... others to do the same. When in 1810 her daughter-in-law was in the midst of a dalliance with Sir Geoffrey Webster, Lady Holland’s son, Lady Melbourne told Caroline that her behaviour the previous night had been ‘disgraceful in its appearances and . . . disgusting in its motives’. That may seem pretty rich coming from her. But she was complaining not ...”

“... while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with over four times Britain’s population, manages with 435 Congressmen. That number never goes up because Congressmen have real power and even a few ...”

“... The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it mitigates the worst effects of their being bad. This brings us to the main uses of power in the classical liberal or, in Robert Nozick’s phrase, the ...”

“... into hers. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf says what Light says of her and more. Clarissa Dalloway at her best is a modern Julia Stephen, poised at the head of a household, knowing as she pauses on the landing ‘the very temper of her house!’ The sounds that maddened Woolf in real life – ‘the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door ...”