“... his business was ‘to get into touch with the common folk here, to find out what they desire, hope, or fear’. By the early months of 1891 he had formed the notion, as he wrote in Something of Myself, ‘of trying to tell to the English something of the world outside England – not directly but by implication ... Bit by bit, my original notion grew into ...”

“... militia) and into the 19th; it lingers on, perhaps, in the cadet forces of public schools. Charles II and James II, by contrast, hoped to disarm the militia and replace it by an efficient standing army. Under William III, Parliament was persuaded that a large army was compatible with Parliamentary control of taxation, and England has had both a ...”

“... was less of a parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emanuel than there had been under Charles Albert’; and he goes on to delight the reader with eyewitness accounts of the King’s boorishness and of his ‘strong predilection for blackguards of the spy genus’, as the British Ambassador wrote in one dispatch. Another dispatch recorded that ...”

“... in low humour, and could not distinguish true satire from scurrility; and the other, in the hope of having some post given him by those whom he had abused, in order to silence his dramatic talent.’ But it is Fielding’s author as advocate, not Savage’s author as Iscariot, that underlies King’s view of Haywood. She’s never quite able to catch a ...”

“... my interpretation is right, the appearing of the Lord cannot overpass the year 1881.’ The hope that he might be among the chosen, that he need never taste death, was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Still traumatised by his experiences in Alabama, he was immediately attracted by the radical egalitarianism of the Hackney Brethren. He broke ...”

“... the ‘real’ thought of his age: he reduced Coleridge’s concept of Romanticism and Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution alike to sport. What Peacock himself said on Miss McCarthy’s topic is surprisingly like her own point of view – that literature has drifted unnecessarily far from intellectuality. But it cannot be denied that the great ...”

“... of individual sportsmen too. Sport seems to license people to behave badly in a way they could not hope to get away with in normal life.Horspool takes us through the weird variety of sports practised by the British, from the medieval tournament and the Turf to golf and the Empire Games, scoring all round the wicket with the grace and economy of a Hammond or a ...”

“... Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner.’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer is a ‘distressing ...”

“... persons; there was endless leisure for the ‘gossip and badinage’ which, according to Charles Tennyson, formed the staple of talk among his intimates; admitted among these was always at least a select number of undergraduates whose friendship, more often than not, he retained throughout life. In later years the scene darkened. There was an ...”

“... programme for writing stories, as I’ve said. KB: In an essay called ‘The Post-Modern Aura’ Charles Newman has spoken of ‘Neo-Realism’ in fiction as ‘the classic conservative response to inflation – under-utilisation of capacity, reduction of inventory and verbal joblessness’. The essay was written just after What we talk about came out, and ...”

“... of identity and selfhood among Anglo-American philosophers (I am thinking, for example, of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self) it seems fair to say that most philosophers today have a ‘resistance’ – Cavell’s word – to any project as immodest and self-aggrandising as ‘guiding the soul’. But something like this project was once widely ...”

“... religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community – and nationality’. Similarly, Charles Taylor reminds Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ...”

“... at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and enjoyed a lifetime of connubial happiness, sustained by ...”

“... round the houses. It may be that The Nature of the Book is most rewardingly approached not in the hope of finding a coherent thesis in it but as a miscellany of essays, or perhaps as an attempt to write too many interesting books at once. Johns’s starting-point is indignation. He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been ...”

“... among the poor, in his own words, ‘as a man longs for his wedding day’. Beatrice Potter and Charles Booth figure, but more as urban explorers and dabblers in cross-class masquerade than as sociological researchers. Toynbee Hall’s ubiquitous Samuel and Henrietta Barnett show up, but their sexually conflicted acolyte, C.R. Ashbee, quickly elbows them ...”