“... T.J.​ Clark begins If These Apples Should Fall with a restaging of his first encounter with Cézanne, when as a 15-year-old in 1958 he was amazed by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples: ‘I think I can retrieve the feeling even sixty years later.’ This is one version of ‘the present’ in his subtitle, the summoning of a then of Cézanne painting and Clark looking into a now of his writing and our reading ...”

“... It was the patrician Alan Clark who most accurately summed up the approach of the British and American Governments to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Nothing, he reckoned, was better for business than a lot of foreigners killing one another. This has been true of all foreign wars throughout the ages, but for businessmen of the Clark mentality a hot war in the Eighties which demanded endless supplies of expensive weaponry and technology was almost too good to be true ...”

“... Ossie Clark, for those who never hankered after his confections in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was a dress designer. His designs are in museums of fashion quite as legitimately as a gold necklace from ancient Egypt is displayed in the British Museum, or the uniform of the Light Brigade is illustrated in the Imperial War Museum ...”

“... a New Oxford History of England? The old one, got off the ground with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume on 1914-45, does not much ring in the mind, except for its first two volumes (Collingwood and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any ...”

“... Ezra Pound’s Cantos, ‘you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.’ T.J. Clark is an Alpinist of distinction: Courbet, Manet, Pollock, Poussin, no foothills, no detours (apart from Lowry). And now Picasso. There are the Alps. ‘They don’t make sense,’ Bunting claimed. But Pound made sense. Some people still understand him. The ...”

“... to share with the Executive political control over the Agency’s operations, and passing the Clark Amendment which forbade clandestine support for movements such as Unita, the Union for the Total National Independence of Angola. In less than a decade, but especially in the last four years, the pendulum has swung more sharply in the opposite direction ...”

“... rear of the New Central Hotel in Blackpool. The police identified the body as that of 17-year-old Christopher Hartley. A minute or two went by before you began to wonder how they’d managed it. Presumably from fingerprints: police sources indicated that Christopher had a criminal record, though they didn’t want to make ...”

“... Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him ...”

“... I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection ...”

“... styles varying from the aggressively “butch” to the coyly sexy.’ So there you have it. Christopher Booker, to whom I shall come in a moment, goes further, and means it more seriously: ‘Two unfailing barometers of cultural optimism in our century have been the height of buildings and the height of girls’ hemlines.’ This is not only rubbish but ...”

“... is three books: Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938), The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941), and the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1963, published as Varieties of Parable (1965). The new Selected Literary Criticism reprints material from 1931 to the year of his death, 1963: mostly reviews of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, a few cultural ...”

“... impends in 1992. A rather candid reply to a Parliamentary question, given early last year by Alan Clark, summarises the whole position neatly. Mr Clark had been invited to say which OECD countries spent either more or less of their gross product on fixed investment than did the United Kingdom. He responded: Comparisons for ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... and his overmastering desire to avoid a repetition. Some years ago, I was interviewing Alan Clark MP about his book The Donkeys, a rugged study of British Great War generalship which became the script for Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War. He suddenly said to me: ‘I daresay you’ve been told I’m a Fascist.’ I admitted that I had heard ...”

“... belli in the war of Macfarlane versus Lawrence Stone, R.H. Tawney, Rodney Hilton, George Homans, Christopher Hill, C.H. Wilson, C.B. Macpherson (and long-dead greats such as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies) is his answer to the question of why fully-fledged industrial capitalism first took off in England. This has usually been thought to be ...”