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“... the imagination and fixed into a picture by something that amounts to fiction’, in the view of Herbert Butterfield. Fiction, through which most readers experience the past, derives much of its appeal, as history does, from its arrangement in causal narrative. For David Lowenthal, ‘history has grown more like fiction, fiction more like history,’ while ...”

“... to migrate than others. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we ...”

“... had the advantage of being able to consult many surviving friends of Ford, including Allen Tate, Herbert Read, Jean Rhys and Rebecca West. He also had access to the papers of Ford’s mistress Violet Hunt and the Ford collections in various American libraries, notably those of Cornell and Princeton. Judd and Saunders were denied by death of useful ...”

“... Indeed, Derek Mahon’s essay in that book, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, mentioned the matter only to set it aside. ‘He had no place in the intellectual history of modern Ireland,’ Mahon argued, ‘his place was in Oxford, Hampstead, or Broadcasting House, among Englishmen who had had the same sort of education as himself.’ Still, the ...”

“... school that the overwhelming amount of nitrogen released into the air was from decaying vegetable matter. In fact – I think my memory is correct on this – that’s why, in the 18th century, they gave the name to that great range of mountains in Appalachia, the “Smoky Mountains”.’ Quite, said Buckley. ‘Just one such reply from Reagan deflates the ...”

“... elegiac feel. The poems for or about recently dead friends and poets (Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown) tend to be wide-ranging meditations on literature and language.In his criticism as well as his poetry, Heaney has always excelled at finding metaphors of process for the act of ...”

“... were associated with, or at least publicly supportive of, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. I could name names, but then I’d be naming names. What about signatories to an open letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at least the ...”

“... infestation’. Criticism of the purge is easy. ‘Treason,’ as Talleyrand remarked, ‘is a matter of dates.’ And the sight of so many résistants de la dernière heure naturally encouraged cynicism. ‘Wasn’t the secret of the purge,’ Roger Peyrefitte wrote, ‘that there had to be victims so that there could be heroes?’ In a sense, it is ...”

“... War, ranging from Jane Addams to Mabel Dodge Luhan, by way of such major intellectual figures as Herbert Croly and John Dewey. Besides restoring to life some neglected but important names in American intellectual history, Lasch emphasised what many on the left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate ...”

“... those few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor ...”

“... the Service. Reed, adopting Nelson’s tactics, declined to see the signal, and the Navy let the matter drop. Ramsbotham was posted to the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, and during the following autumn and winter commuted, whenever he was off duty, from Portsmouth to Dorchester where Reed was living at the Antelope Hotel, continuing his ...”

“... young man addressed in the Sonnets is the Earl of Southampton, not, as some still think, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the ...”

“... for all history to veer over into whig history.’ That sentence is taken from the introduction to Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, one of those ‘classics’ which is now more referred to than read. Its title, together with the generalised sense of ‘Whig history’, may have entered the language, but beyond having a vague ...”

“... Characters of Love, so it is vain to expect him to go over the ground again. My own sense of the matter is that he has exaggerated the differences between Europe and America and has taken the short way to pronounce in favour of the European type in morality and imagination. The notion that American writers create ‘a new consciousness that does duty as a ...”

“... times. First there were the startlingly sour Prytherch poems – still for me the ones that matter most – then the Welsh Nationalist phase, then the deus absconditus prayer-bout, then the vague musings about God as cosmic scientist, then the poems inspired by paintings, and so on. The drift throughout has been away from the carefully wrought ...”