“... since you translated this’, and Johnson replied, ‘with a sort of triumphant smile, “Sir, I hope it is.”’ It seems likely that his hardening of Lobo’s comment about the Moors had in fact a stylistic rather than a substantive character, in the sense of being a simplification which brought an essential attitude into stronger relief than in the ...”

“... in coalition with their unspeakable parents, against the unlucky fall-guy or -girl of the house: Charles (or Clarissa) Doublebind. It comes as no surprise to note that Charles/Clarissa, a naive and dithering but basically rather sweet personality, has been driven into a spiralling psychosis through this unholy conspiracy ...”

“... was Wordsworthian, this diction was evangelical.’ Where Davie tends to be good on Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley makes him nervous, for Wesley ‘is a poet of vehement feeling’. Too much feeling in hymn-poetry Davie is certainly not prepared to countenance. Poetry that expresses giving way to feeling seems to Davie un-British and unmanly. It is in some ...”

“... saying: Good evening, I would just like to say first that, as an interviewer, and as what I hope you will believe to be an unbiased member of the electorate, I’m grateful to Anthony Eden for inviting me to cross-question him on political issues. I would like, too, to feel that I am asking questions which you yourselves would like to ask in my ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a local ‘businessman’ given to ...”

“... is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward filled that gap. Here was the map ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door ...”

“... mean School of, Circle of, Follower of, Style of – ‘or nothing much at all’. ‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’ Tony asks. Martin has no doubts at all about this. ‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean.’ And so Martin lays his plans. Help Tony sell the Giordano, offer to take the other paintings off his hands, and ...”

“... the moral chaos of the modern world has simply been described by philosophers, from what it might hope to be if this chaos had been to any substantial degree generated by their intellectual activities. If the latter were the case, the resuscitation of an unjustly and unwisely abandoned philosophical heritage would in itself be an effective form of social ...”

“... to both works illustrates an editorial will-to-power occasionally recalling that of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote. Privileged and put-down, Craft has had an unlucky cultural role. Famous, esteemed for a diversity of talents, he has necessarily provoked resentment for his domination of a public genius; and there is evidence to assume that he resents it ...”

“... with Sophie, at one time ‘the surest thing between Bridgend and Carmarthen town’, wife of Charles Norris, one of the male group who meet at the Bible, who is a co-owner in the restaurant business with his brother Victor: ‘Absolutely not my cup of tea. He’s ... you know.’ ‘What, you mean ...’ ‘Well, we’re not supposed to mind them these ...”

“... We should hear more from some of these women. Now they have been freshly discovered, we may hope to have a printed collection of letters and journals – especially the letters of Elizabeth Amherst, the diary of Sarah Cowper, the Papillon papers and the letters of Marthae Taylor. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy presents us with much material, the object of ...”

“... he were alive’, of Richard II. In his absence, the Mortimer claim to the monarchy could hope to find a base within Wales. The support of the disaffected Percy family, including Hotspur, generated plans to revamp the entire power structure of Britain – a problematic document known as the Tripartite Indenture appears to unveil the ...”

“... On an atoll​ in the Indian Ocean, on an April day in 1836 when the water was unusually smooth, Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties ...”

“... too little or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip – ‘When I am dead, I hope it may be said:/”His sins were scarlet but his books were read”’ – prompts the thought that if he had committed any scarlet sins they would have been made public long ago. His elderly infatuation with Lady Juliet Duff, subject of many epigrams, was ...”