“... to return from the village.  And when all the coats had been sold, the jewels and the suits, Herbert went into Balaban’s room, sorted out his clothes and tied them up in a sheet. Tomorrow he would sell them to the farmers. At night, of course, people were afraid. But they helped one another. If a man fell or was beaten, he was not abandoned.‘Of ...”

“... be more valuable to minor politicians in the Argentine... than it will be to men of vision. A.P. Herbert in the Law Quarterly Review, Vol.44, 1928, came to much the same conclusion: ‘One may well ask whether it was worth while raising the question of British rights, even academically.’ Misleading Cases, in the same volume, gets a better notice. Dr Goebel ...”

“... Society and £50,000 in a Coutts bank account. There was no family money. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, left his daughter nothing. Although Mandelson’s salary increased when he briefly served in the Cabinet, the gap between income and outgoings remains dizzying and unexplored. Only the English can dismiss the need to ask impertinent questions of ...”

“... an account, Burrow observes, which seems so convincing, yet does not convince; the scurrilities of Matthew Paris, not least about Matthew’s own abbey at St Albans, plagued for a while by dodgy builders and a crooked monk who died shouting ‘Take him, Satan!’ on a distant privy; Jocelin de Brakelonde’s contributions to ...”

“... with them. Perhaps the episcopal reputation most strikingly rescued by Collinson is that of Tobie Matthew, James I’s Archbishop of York, whom we normally meet as a great church jobber and witty court preacher. Collinson reports the chance survival of Matthew’s diary, which shows him, ill and very old, travelling great ...”

“... that the young Day Lewis ‘played off’ not just against Auden, but also against Donne, George Herbert, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Frost). You might think of this as a talent for adaptability. In The Buried Day Day Lewis is frank about the ‘incipient hero-worship’ of his youth, and recalls that ‘I ...”

“... the kids would have left for school so it was time for him to be heading home. Near Lardner lived Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of New York’s smartest paper at the time, the World. Churchwell writes that Swope was socially ravenous and had people in almost nightly – lots of people, whose loud talk while drinking Swope’s liquor made it hard for ...”

“... Snippets from the Reviews like Macmillans’ Magazine or the Fortnightly Review, titbits from Herbert Spencer, Comte or Matthew Arnold, snatches of Max Muller on solar myths or Mahaffy on Greece, pages of Carlyle’s French Revolution, 75 maxims of Balthasar Gracian: the notebooks are a giant sampler of the thought of ...”

“... of the ‘Birmingham Enlightenment’ is gripping. He doesn’t make it altogether clear why Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin chose to base their Lunar Society at Soho House in Handsworth, but he does paint an intriguing picture of the industrial-scientific circle that grew up around them. For these men, the line between industrial ...”

“... and which emerges again in Robert Burton, Tennyson and the ‘eternal note of sadness’ that Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. Albion is itself expressive of ‘one of the most significant and salient aspects of the English imagination’ – its reverence for the past. There is no hint of identity crisis here; no sign of the bewilderment afflicting ...”

“... the Christ figure as chalky spectre against a dark cross. It caught the attention of the critic Herbert Read, who reproduced it in Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture, published that year, alongside Picasso’s Female Bather with Raised Arms. (The reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my ...”