“... 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 ...”

“... crisis. Corbyn usually comes after ‘Don’t Know’ when the public is asked who will make the best prime minister: at the end of April one poll had Theresa May on 61 per cent (higher than Thatcher in 1983 and Blair in 2001) and Corbyn on 26 per cent. It also had the Tories on 49 per cent for voting intention and Labour on 23 per cent. Figures of this sort ...”

“... has two words, Geist and Witz. In the English translation of De l’esprit ‘spirit’ is the best choice, of course, since it captures better the philosophical ambiguity that Derrida is exploiting. So when Derrida says that ‘no one ever speaks of esprit in Heidegger,’ he might also seem to be right if esprit were translated as ‘wit’. He would ...”

“... Boxley Abbey in 1538 at the time of the monastery’s dissolution. The removal was carried out by Geoffrey Chamber, an agent of Thomas Cromwell, who reported to his master that he had plucked down the Rood, ‘which has been had in great veneration’, only to find ‘certain engines and old wire, with old rotten sticks in the back of the same which caused ...”

“... the religious life of England. That damning appraisal was most clearly set out in the late Geoffrey Dickens’s The English Reformation (1964), which dominated the historiography for thirty years. Dickens distilled his overwhelmingly negative picture into the claim that the Marian regime, bedevilled by an ‘arid legalism’, had ‘failed to discover ...”

“... who represented swashbuckling capitalism; Keith Joseph, who represented high-minded anti-statism; Geoffrey Howe, who represented disciplined proto-monetarism. But she saw them all off easily. In this she was greatly helped by their obvious lack of leadership qualities. Du Cann was cavalier and untrustworthy; Joseph was flaky and depressive; Howe was deadly ...”

“... further concessions. It believes that Brexit has put the Union itself in jeopardy, giving it the best chance it has had in a generation to achieve its main political goal of Irish unification. It is not a good time for Unionist politicians to be digging in their heels over secondary issues like legislation on the Irish language. But the DUP’s role as ...”

“... and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly ...”

“... his art, as though a perpetual risk of failure were somehow an integral part of it. Several of his best readers have picked up on this quality of his imagination: McDonald has written (admiringly) of the ‘apparent fragility’ of the poems, and the critic John Lyon argued that ‘precariousness is a precondition of Longley’s art.’ Longley, who was all ...”

“... of a tale well told and the secretive delights of obscurity and latent disruption. The point is best made in a remarkable piece on ‘The English Novel, circa 1907’. This brings together an unlikely assemblage of novelists, from Elinor Glyn and Florence Barclay to Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Conrad. That their fictions all touched, however ...”

“... useful act of emotional intelligence which often appears in accounts of the moral life: the poet, best epitomised by Shakespeare, is able magically to conjure himself into modes of being quite other than his own, ‘continually in for and filling some other Body’, as Keats wrote in a letter. Shelley sought to make the link between artistic creation and ...”

“... referring to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the ...”

“... term for conveying all the cruelties that were inflicted in such places before death.’ The best sustained piece of thinking in the book is by Derwent May, on the media. His central insight, well followed and well worth following further, is of the collusion or complicity implied in euphemism, its willing suspension of ...”

“... Prior puts much of the blame for the industrial relations disasters of the Heath Government on Sir Geoffrey Howe rather than on Heath himself: it was Howe who insisted on trying to rebuild the entire edifice of industrial relations by imposing a legal framework which neither the employers nor the unions wished to touch with a bargepole. Indeed, Howe wanted to ...”

“... high C is a triumph, but The Tempest, for example, cannot live up to the melancholy lyrics of its best songs. Prospero says he forgives his brother, but he only means he has trapped him. ‘Justice has triumphed over injustice, not because it is more harmonious, but because it commands superior force; one might even say because it is louder.’ And when ...”