“... 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 ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who volunteered for service in the British Army even after the Easter Rising in 1916) occur only at the ...”

“... it was Tom, who had not a tithe of the intellectual power of his brother Matthew, or of Arthur Clough, who alone gained Firsts in Mods and Greats. His friends and relatives despaired of his habit of ruining his worldly chances by a constitutional impulsiveness of character, beginning with his decision to emigrate to New Zealand at the age of 24 when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could ...”

“... foreword, intro and preface as if I hadn’t made them yet. Gautier’s extended polemic has very little to do with the novel itself. It was, in fact, written to lengthen the total text so that it might be issued in two volumes, and would have been better called a fusillade. His attack on the utilitarian character of the bourgeoisie came to be regarded, after ...”

“... of a sex-maniac’. The 18-year-old heroine, Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, is a little in love with all the members of the family who come to live next door, and madly in love with one of them, Roddy. The first part of the book is a long retrospective, the story of Judith’s first meeting with the Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was ...”