“... train station – a location suitable to the memory of one who was always in transition. Janet said passionately how much she disliked Oxford – surprising myself, who still loved Oxford with a devotion that might have seemed simple-minded even to me if it had not been so iridescent. I was impressed by both the intensity and the sophistication of ...”

“... count for much with this unimpressionable ex-cabaret dancer – un serpent qui danse, the poet said, using an image not highly regarded by the girl who knows perfectly well how snakes move. Nor is she willing to accept without comment the exotic heritage he foists on her – la langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique (all that) – knowing herself, in ...”

“... had only five kings, one of whom, Æthelbald, was ‘the longest-reigning English monarch before Edward III’, a record (716-57) almost beaten by his successor, Offa (757-96). The kings held together what were initially separate tribes or people – the Hwicce, whose name survives in Wychwood, the dwellers of the Peak district and the Wrekin; the ...”

“... the shape of double-page ‘picture essays’ devoted to particular topics – though it should be said that Campbell and Wormald have themselves composed nine out of 19 of these. The main text is aimed at a fairly wide readership, but it also raises far-reaching issues. All three authors are men who have made – and are continuing to make – substantial ...”

“... with many whom, in his day, he despised: Humbert Wolfe, for example, and Vita Sackville-West and Edward Shanks. Can it be that he belongs in such forgotten company? Is his a just neglect? Reading the life, one must conclude that if he indeed had a genuine poetic gift, he had other qualities of mind and character that worked against that gift, and that his ...”

“... prophets, it encouraged those Welsh who had felt exiles in their own land since the victories of Edward I to pursue claims made as the original ‘Britons’. Glyn Dŵr had little trouble in linking himself with the long line of Welsh messiahs, including Arthur, who offered to expel the English and regain control of the whole island of Britain. The revolt ...”

“... That wonderful Edward Coke,’ wrote the great Maitland, ‘masterful, masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare ...”

“... seen as someone who intends no major change of course. In a televised interview on 11 January, he said he would deal with Israel and Palestine in the manner of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The unhappy message of his recent utterances has been reconciliation without truth; and reconciliation, above all, for Americans. This preference for ...”

“... vanish, into thin air.’ Beckett’s Dying Words is not a study of Beckett’s dying words if he said any, or of Malone’s. It is about words spoken or written in the vicinity of death, responsive to a conviction of their own death – a death which does not abort the possibility of a little further life before the body is coffined. It is a study of the ...”

“... the dance. There was a Princess Margaret Set, just as the Prince Regent had the Carlton House Set, Edward VII had the Marlborough House Set, and Edward VIII had the Fort Belvedere Set: three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig ...”

“... decaying sense but always new and stainless like the idea of rights – rights not duties be it said – yes brother so Locke hires a surgeon barber to make an incision in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s right side for like a monstrous dragon of superstition and formal piety the suppurating cyst on the earl’s liver menaced English liberty but the little ...”

“... Here is a fullish description of the ‘cowardly brute’ from Thomas Hughes: Flashman, be it said, was about 17 years old, and big and strong for his age. He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for heartiness, and ...”

“... a sound guide to advanced taste in the late Twenties. Writing of the postwar years, Leavis had said: ‘The opposition to the Georgians was already at the time in question (just after the war) Sitwellism. But the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.’ This Osbert hated. His anti-Georgian blasts, his own ‘let us be ...”

“... of a young man for something he had never really known,’ McCarthy remarks. It might equally be said that Byrd created an English Catholic musical future which failed to come into existence; English Catholics wouldn’t have the public presence or the resources needed to use his work for another three centuries (and even then not many of them did). Byrd ...”

“... first of the Age of Reason, he was the last of the magicians’.There’s something to be said for this opinion. In her history of English alchemy, Jennifer Rampling pays relatively little attention to Newton, perhaps because he’s an over-ploughed furrow, but does quote a startling passage from folio 13r of MS Keynes 22, an early Elizabethan ...”