“... a lot of talk about ‘talking the language of the new politics’, and I think I heard Shirley Williams refer to the ‘nodes of the new society’. Ian Bradley sees this new society as a post-social democratic society. For him, liberalism is a mystical cult of the individual. Everything that suits his argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... does not have that extra dimension, obvious for example in people like Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams as ministers, of being a warm personality in an essentially male environment.’ Certainly a personality does come across in these pages. Our PM clearly has both mental and physical courage (witness her visit to Armagh) and she lacks that maddening ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... he ties around his waist. His first thought is to reclaim his house, which was seized by Settler Williams with the help of his servant, John Boy, both of whom pursued him into the bush, where they spent years tracking him until he finally managed to kill them. On his return, Matigari can tell almost immediately that ...”

“... Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest against the ‘cult of homosexual superiority’, a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri ...”

“... To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ‘the ...”

“... the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes: – – – slippers, (which his nimble hasteHad falsely thrust upon contrary feet,) I know not how the commentators understand this important passage, which in Dr Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently beautiful, and, on the whole, not ...”

“... Anglophilia: he was an admirer of the music of Delius, Bax, Finzi, Rubbra and especially Vaughan Williams. That’s possible, but these composers’ influence isn’t at all obvious in the score for The Trouble with Harry: its best cue, ‘The Doctor’, offers a jaunty, bittersweet melody for high strings played over a repeating woodwind figure, and sounds ...”

“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... subject matter and literary strategy, following the frankly homoerotic early stories of Tennessee Williams.’ Hmm – if you’re following in the footsteps of an earlier writer can you be said to be opening doors? And if Purdy was bold to follow in his wake, how is Williams’s own courage to be assessed?...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... Wedding. It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong ...”

“... they should have been under existing policy). Charles Clarke was replaced as home secretary by John Reid, who described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’. Non-citizens with criminal records found themselves facing deportation. Current prisoners without British citizenship were identified, and when their sentences ended were held in prisons and ...”

“... for figurative language is a feature of his style, and also a pointer to his critical interests. John Ashbery’s poetry is said to be ‘like an electrotherapy relieving the stiff neck of the sublime, and helping our numbness to speak’. Does our cultural plight put us in a madhouse or a massage parlour here? Hartman is thinking about his style, not our ...”