“... This poem for Auden lovingly re-creates for him places around Grigson’s summer home in France; and readers of Notes from an Odd Country (1970) will not be surprised. France releases in Grigson moods of gratified expansiveness which mysteriously evade him as soon as he re-crosses the Channel. It can only be at his ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”

“... than his presumably non-intellectual colleague, Joseph Chamberlain, to see that Germany, not France, was the danger. As late as 1908 Balfour assumed that in a war Britain’s enemy would in the first instance be a power other than Germany. But he did not expect a major war with anybody. ‘There are, so far, no symptoms,’ he assured the young women of ...”

“... the better class of sleeve-note in his record collection will hardly have need of it. The title of David Wulstan’s book Tudor Music promises well. The periodisation of music into ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ is misleading for virtually every country except Italy, and Professor Wulstan’s selection of the Tudor monarchs as setting a time-scale has ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... of both the nation and themselves. This landed establishment waged a second hundred-year war with France which began in 1689 and finally resulted in victory at Waterloo. It conquered first one and then a second empire. After 1832, the Whigs presided over the transition of Britain from a laissez-faire patriarchal state to one in which a growing number of ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”

“... is concerned, but then things get a little complicated, because the novel is set in 17th-century France, and concerns the devils of Loudun – Aldous Huxley published his account of this celebrated case in 1952. In fact, we have to jump over two largish fences to get to Johnson’s book at all. In America it was published (in 1984) as an instance of ...”

“... begin one year after the outbreak of the French Revolution; they include Britain’s wars with France which lasted, almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and sheer, exhilarating talent. No fewer than 13 prime ...”

“... the ‘realistic status’ of the literary property-holder (particularly, one may note, in France, where the author, unlike his Anglo-American colleague, has a moral right in law). is thus the index of intransigent and triumphant counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, a nucleus of young British post-structuralists have drifted towards Marxist activism ...”