“... and a morality that can be formulated and talked about, not just sealed in the amber of Walter Pater’s cadences. His own talk about it, particularly when he shows it in splendid action in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is as good as Pound’s talk, and comes, as Pound’s does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti ...”

“... for at one level they issued from, and conferred, an experience of the good things of life. George III is credited with the accurate prediction that ‘he was a very clever fellow, but that he would never be a bishop.’ Smith was bored by the country, but was exiled for most of his career to rural livings – at Foston in Yorkshire and Combe Florey in ...”

“... the hubris of planners. Two years later, he helped to organise the colloquium in Paris inspired by Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, which had used Austrian ideas to attack Roosevelt’s New Deal, while also urging liberals to move past ‘the fallacy of laissez-faire’ and build a positive legal-political agenda. The German ...”

“... are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ‘missing’ book I could think of. For all the reasons – the ticked boxes – above; for a rather beautiful relation between the life as old as the century (1900-85) and the ...”

“... Earl of Somerset, was being supplanted as James I’s latest most beloved delegate on earth by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. For a playwright working under such regimes, picturing ideal monarchs might be a far safer option than depicting the ways in which the affairs of state were really being conducted. This is certainly suggested by the experience ...”

“... Shandy Hall inhabit a world of incompetently linked ideas – Toby’s obsession with war games, Walter’s doomed theories – in sporadic collision with unco-operative physical facts. Porter rightly says that the book keeps leading us back to ‘a body which never lets the mind forget its presence’. In general he sees the body and natural sentiment as ...”

“... with the extraordinary Goncourt brothers, with Turgenev and Maupassant. The correspondence with George Sand is particularly engaging. More than anyone else, Sand challenged Flaubert’s advocacy of impersonality, astutely suggesting that it was his own personal issue more than anything else. She pointed out how good and generous he was to his friends, which ...”

“... the bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... stirred. Kate Loveman’s new book traces the way Evelyn’s triumph prompted the master, George Neville, to consider whether he ought to do something about the 17th-century diary in his collection. He lent the first volume to an uncle, who passed it to another uncle, who advised Neville to find ‘some man for whom the lucre of gain will sacrifice a ...”

“... Quentin chapter of The Sound and the Fury) obscures the attempt at honest praise of the labour of George Gudger. Why did Agee fluff and pamper this conventional theme of the writer as criminal? The enigmatic figure of Edgar had somehow become for him an image of the suffering artist – the character possibly getting entangled with a memory of Lear’s speech ...”

“... This has allowed the steady growth in power of a class of insiders and experts, first described by Walter Lippmann during the Thirties, whose technical skill and organic affiliations with the power structure gradually insulated them from scrutiny and accountability. It is my impression that whereas the first clandestine operatives as well as their immediate ...”

“... commissioning long disco mixes not from the artists themselves but from DJs like Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Many of the successful DJ remixes in this era were relentlessly percussive, often incorporating salsa or African rhythms. Ironically, the longer mixes were rarely played in full: DJs using two copies of the record would just repeat the percussive ...”

“... which had built up an artificial nature.’ (Another candidate for transformation – he reads Walter Pater – is not so lucky, being despatched by a Mad Mullah on page 140.) Kipling was less sanguine. His early stories show innocence broken rather than transformed, and Britain separated from the British in India by irreconcilable differences of ...”

“... for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?’ is not just appropriate to a poem for children. It is a real question, just as this, from Stevie Smith, is real information: Cool and plain Cool and plain Was the message of love on the window ...”