“... the imaginary creatures of an author is somehow – well, ‘uncritical’. The fact is, Wall has little time for the Trollope critics. One of the striking features of his book is its thinness of scholarly reference. Trollope and Character is, I guess, the longest work of commentary on the author ever written. It has no bibliography and just twenty terse ...”

“... of the many, not the few – will be merciless on 8 June.’ But then, ten days later, a little jittery: ‘Theresa May needs to up her election game as Labour’s “freebie manifesto” is starting to fool some.’ By 1 June, as the polls skid, there is a discernible note of panic: ‘Theresa May must spell out why voters should choose her – not ...”

“... she wrote in the final song on her debut album.) Subsequently, she mythologised her daughter as ‘Little Green’ (‘call her green for the children who have made her’). The glamour of Mitchell’s words made loss beautiful and forgiveness possible. ‘You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed/...”

“... there.’ The recognition that the viral surges of anger and hope between 2015 and 2020 have left little in the way of a political legacy has already given rise to some thoughtful historical and theoretical accounts, including Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, Hannah Proctor’s Burnout and Jäger and Arthur Borriello’s The ...”

“... accusation is unclear. He alludes in a footnote to Berlin’s support for the Vietnam War but says little else about his subjects’ supposed hawkish tendencies. Perhaps he is suggesting, reasonably enough, that some Cold War liberals, in their focus on Soviet wrongdoing, ignored or denied or soft-pedalled crimes committed by the US and its allies. In any ...”

“... helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”

“... the British public – notwithstanding the myths propagated by party zealots – seems to have had little difficulty with pragmatic Labour, Tory and Liberal politicians working together towards a common purpose. The laity has largely been spared subsequent opportunities to endorse cross-party co-operation. The pejorative associations of the term ...”

“... that work formulated a full response to the work of her heroes – Picasso, Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arthur Rackham, Gustave Doré. The work most indicative of things to come is a painting for which she received a prize at the Slade, Under Milk Wood (1954), which transposes to a Portuguese kitchen Dylan Thomas’s (then new) radio play. Creatures dead and ...”

“... Commons met for the first time in the Chapter House.)It seems wrong that these monuments are so little regarded. They make the abbey the most vivid and uncompromising encounter with Britain’s old power elites in the full glory of their Ozymandias-like hubris (Shelley, incidentally, only got a measly Poets’ Corner stone tablet, alongside Keats, in ...”

“... sunshine and bohemia and ‘probably an unconscious desire to get away from Chicago’.Her father, Arthur Cohen, a political activist and labour organiser, died when she was thirteen. He casts a long shadow over her work and is given the last word in The Flowering, the latest addition to her autobiography. She describes the ‘near constant political ...”

“... Some authorities insist on regarding her as a great philosopher’s rather tiresome consort: Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the lively Modern Masters essay on Sartre, is at pains to endorse Beauvoir’s own view that she wasn’t her partner’s intellectual equal. Sartre, he writes, ‘appears to have been spectacularly unfaithful’, and Beauvoir was ‘a ...”

“... its victory more warmly welcomed than at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Yet today things look a little different. Despite more than six years’ declared commitment to monetary discipline (even longer if we include the half-hearted efforts of Denis Healey), the UK inflation rate remains stubbornly above that which the Government wishes to see. Meanwhile ...”

“... in 1914 with the International Brigaders, MacDiarmid writes: Despite the undeniable honesty, the little literary gift, What is Sherston’s Progress but an exposure Of the eternal Englishman Incapable of rising above himself, And traditional values winning out Over an attempted independence of mind. MacDiarmid is both right and wrong. Sherston’s Progress ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”