“... some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of the unemployed, of slate-scaled terraces of back-to-backs snaking under slate-grey skies – grainy sooty pictures of gritty sooty surfaces – have earned a ...”

“... he is still at it, painting in the yard and suffering from cold, on the 12th and 15th. Later we read: ‘All day spent placing the shawl on the lay figure’ and of 40 hours pencilling in the pattern of the shawl. Snow stops work on the tarpaulin, the lay figure is out in the yard sitting ‘like a Guy’. Rossetti has borrowed his great coat and a pair of ...”

“... aching, bitter, helpless need’ (‘Manifesto’) is deliberately embarrassing to read, because as Lawrence’s criticism of mechanised relationships developed through the war years, he came to think of neutrality as sinister. Metrical verse would have kept the topic and the reader at too safe a distance; the poems are tuned instead to pick up ...”

“... until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite ...”

“... from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the period, I naively assumed that the food the Bennetts had eaten at Halliday Place was much the same as the food everyone ate in the war, regardless of social status. So I was still capable of being shocked in my twenties when I ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... would decide whether to authorise publication or not, as he saw fit. In any case, he would have read them all himself. Once in France, Swinton was alarmed by German superiority in artillery: If our resourceful, industrious and well-equipped opponents were able to accomplish so much in haste and with improvised means, what might they not do, given ...”

“... the attendants and guards, some of whom had been at the chapel for a decade or more, and he also read through the old visitors’ books the chapel has kept since it was dedicated in 1972, which include more than five thousand entries. As one might expect, the comments he first noticed chimed with his own experience of being unmoved by the paintings, but soon ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 to 1599 or ...”

“... historical context. She has done well to bring Katherine Wilmot back into print. This lively, well-read, intelligent Irish girl was equipped with the qualities of a good traveller: gusto, curiosity, tolerance, endurance, good humour – and an ability to laugh at herself. She is wonderfully free of fashionable attitudes, trusts to her own impressions and ...”

“... joyless austerity or as the embodiment of fair-dealing and social equity. On these grounds alone Peter Clarke’s biography is welcome. His is not the first biography of Cripps. Patricia Strauss wrote one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the ...”

“... staff with people schooled in Reichian practice. Neill rejected both suggestions, but continued to read out Reich’s books at staff meetings. Reich and Neill shared a belief in the redemptive power of unconstricted development in children. For Reich this had an urgent political significance: he thought that only when children were raised free from sexual ...”

“... first revolutionary work, when he had been ‘bold in my youth’ (audax iuuenta, oddly miscued by Peter Fallon as ‘still a callow youth’). Again, it is amazing that the poet who embarked on the Aeneid had seven or eight years earlier published a poem in which his desire to write an epic was suavely depreciated by Apollo, the god of poetry. At the ...”