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“... proposed that the chapel be turned into a swimming-pool. How Alan had loathed the loathsome Dylan Thomas. How Alan had crossed swords with C.S. Lewis, Magdalen’s Fellow in English, on this or that occasion. How, on being asked as a young man at interview whether it was true that he had strongly-held left-wing views, he had replied: ‘No. I have extreme ...”

“... that contrasting intellectual traditions claim to descend from it. On the one hand, there is Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which stresses the functionalist element in Evans-Pritchard’s account. Thomas sees the decline of astrology as linked to improved postal services and better insurance ...”

“... constituencies – the ‘large sections of the media … controlled by climate sceptics like Rupert Murdoch’ and the ‘corporations that have vested interests in the carbon economy’ – aren’t the people Ghosh is trying to jolt out of complacency. Eight of the 14 books he’s written are novels, and in The Great Derangement he shows himself ...”

“... other line than that running from the Romantics through Tennyson, Swinburne, A Shropshire Lad and Rupert Brooke. He has made a new start, and established new bearings.’ The first surprise in Karlin’s anthology is the unmisgiving ease with which he has transcended such considerations as those I have ascribed to Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Leavis. He has given ...”

“... is his child. The real Caroline didn’t die, but neither did she know that she was the child of Rupert Lee, the real Peregrine. Her fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put ...”

“... In the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the hero debates a question which has always worried him: which is better for the careerist, to see the world small or to see it big? The small view has its attractions. Great statesmen and empire-builders must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind ...”

“... Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while more usually ...”

“... which led, in Women in Love, to Gerald Crich’s hunger for ‘snow-abstract annihilation’ and Rupert Birkin’s disappointment with the ‘merely human’. But we must also acknowledge that he had always been fascinated by the ‘non-human’ or the ‘physic’ in men and women. The letter to Garnett restates this preoccupation. ‘I don’t care so much ...”

“... Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s authoritarian rulers. Business is business. But it is disconcerting if not appalling to learn that throughout the 1930s, some major Hollywood studios, despite being heavily populated ...”

“... not continuously besieged. News and supplies were delivered. Guests arrived, notably the botanist Thomas Johnson, the engraver William Faithorne and the elderly architect Inigo Jones. There was a wedding. Spies came and went. Deserters were caught and hanged. A plot to betray the house was uncovered. Then, early in 1644, the massing of Royalist forces around ...”

“... thrived. In 1960, however, a now financially shaky Heinemann and its satellites were acquired by Thomas Tilling, an industrial group with a main interest in construction. They were not, however, interventionist owners and the publishing activities went on much as before, although by the early 1970s Warburg had retired and Secker’s was managed (very ...”

“... rhymes: she schooled her son on nursery songs, and he gradually found his way from A.A. Milne to Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Masefield and Betjeman. Father and mother provided a most genial home. Stallworthy was fortunate, too, in his schools: the Dragon in Oxford, followed by Rugby. Most of his teachers were helpful, and leisure time included ...”

“... hacked the phones of hundreds of people. In July 2011, after a long cover-up collapsed, Rupert Murdoch closed the paper in an attempt to limit the damage. That same month Brooks, Coulson and six other figures linked to News International were charged with breaching the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – which deals with the interception of ...”

“... men, apart from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding ...”

“... has no nationality, and neither have poets. ‘Only minor poets,’ he says, ‘such as Kipling, Thomas Campbell and Rupert Brooke, cared about their country.’ But he could no more escape his country origins than he could reconcile himself to the detestable sophistications of the city. And this is there to be read in the ...”