“... on the destination we travel to.’ What counts is staying power, and this he has in spades. A.P. Herbert, the Punch contributor chosen by Ian Hamilton to represent the ‘something-about-next-to-nothing school’ in the Penguin Book of 20th-Century Essays, could just about manage three pages on bathrooms. De Botton sustains his thoughts ‘On the Country and ...”

“... and justly; but in this same Introduction, he fails to do justice to another Carlyle scholar, Herbert Grierson. In 1930, Grierson gave a lecture entitled ‘Carlyle and Hitler’, in which he seemed to find some resemblance between the anti-democratic attitudes of the two men. To think this is to misread him, however. ...”

“... Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light. Nor does poor Herbert Huncke, ‘sad, sweet, dark, holy’, as Kerouac describes him in Desolation Angels. Parts of his notebooks were published in the 1960s, but he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky ...”

“... life rather than art to art, or fiction to fiction. In two respects, unfortunately, Fatherland by Robert Harris makes artistic comparisons inescapable. It belongs, first, to that select genre of fiction which deals in the Alternative Present, or in this case an alternative recent past. It is set in 1964 in the vast, imperial, intimidating Berlin of an ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... as far as Chicago. Introducing The Conquerors, Malraux’s 1928 novel of the 1925 Canton uprising, Herbert Lottman takes a far more abrasive tone than his two colleagues. ‘The Con-querors,’ he says, ‘has been called ... the “least good” of the author’s books. If so, where to place Man’s Hope, Days of Wrath, and the post-Word War Two ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... Interviewed by the BBC 25 years after Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ‘evolution ...”

“... and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to teach decorum in 1557, criticised those boys who came out of school ‘running like a heap of bees … whooping and hallooing as in ...”

“... Nine years ago Herbert Tucker wrote an excellent first book, Browning’s Beginnings; like many first books it gave the impression of being a labour of love. Tucker’s second is a tremendous disappointment. It has all the inflated idea of itself that the title suggests. Browning’s Beginnings was short, keen and suggestive ...”

“... to the dissertation topic by remarking that he had recently had his ‘biorhythms’ done. Herbert Butterfield, whose notion of Whiggishness continues to provoke among English historians even more examinations of conscience than St Benedict recommended, warned against historians like me. Those who specialise in fields such as alchemy ‘seem to become ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... Some, it turns out, have a further distance to migrate than others. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by ...”

“... Georg Lukacs and the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with the singsong ‘There are no conspiracies in history.’ The ‘authoritarian personality’ dogma of such Frankfurt School existentialists as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, is derived from the same ...”