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“... is for ‘possessiveness’, with ‘wit’ the runner-up. Nancy’s wit was in-your-face. To a man who claimed ‘that his family had never married beneath them, she replied: “I know they can’t but I never knew they realised it.” ’ Fox’s list tells you all you need to know about Nancy, but leaves out her charm, which was ‘such that we all fell ...”

“... of her son Siegfried: like Sieglinde in Die Walküre, she assembles the shattered sword of her man in order to prepare her son against the world. Her diaries were Siegmund’s sword destined for Siegfried: Siegfried, like his namesake, was not to be educated in schools, so that nothing could distract from Richard’s memory. This continual internal ...”

“... is composed of soft words of the sort which Dante, in a delightful passage of De vulgari eloquentia, called ‘womanly’ and ‘nicely combed’ (‘pexa’); rhythmically, the little lines combine to form a classically harmonious seven-syllable verse, a settenario, such as might have been written by Tasso or Leopardi. The ...”

“... against the imminent privatisation of the railway. ‘The future holds no security,’ a man in his sixties told me, bothering his bushy white moustache. ‘We will lose our jobs, ticket prices will rise. Only the rich will benefit from this.’ Passers-by were mostly unmoved; another day, another protest in Mariano Rajoy’s Spain. I was handed a ...”

“... it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would have agreed, was scarcely creative. Yet, If there could be what serious philosophers dream of, a philosophy at once thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful, it would still be ...”

“... Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice ...”

“... on hanging group shows (go alphabetical), the painting of gasometers (choose white), and the droit de suite legislative proposals of 1930 (he’s against).Sickert’s commentaries are not simply pungently phrased; many of them retain their power to bite. His own technical experience and the relative cohesiveness of the era’s critical terms allow him to offer ...”

“... in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in his allotment, but, immediately after remarking on a bitterness ‘rooted in your silence’, the second-person address gives out in a row of dots. The man does not reply, and the rest of the piece describes him in the ...”

“... a plea for a new canonical openness and for the relevance of Southey to the Romantic scene. Paul Hamilton’s ‘Keats and Critique’ argues that ‘the interchangeability in Keats’s poetry of its ideal status and its political reticence gradually begins to expose the contemporary politicising of the ideal and the idealising of the ...”

“... two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American ...”

“... of human life.’ The modern poet, by contrast, is always sentimental about nature, like a sick man yearning for health. Indeed, the sentimental poet idealises nature much as we (including, self-confessedly, Schiller) sentimentalise the Greeks themselves. The problem for modern literature of this loss of innocence is that, in contrast with the ancient ...”

“... on terror’ relates to the authentic revolutionary state of emergency, first articulated by St Paul in his reference to the ‘end of time’. When a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the ‘normal course of things’. It is, you will ...”

“... appetites – for tales, news, gossip or truth. Among the essays is one on Books of Hours by Paul Saenger, who discusses the effect of the ancient discovery of silent reading and the later development of the portable, personal book. He looks at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers ...”

“... this to say for blood and breath,’ runs the latest one, from A.E. Housman: ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Are we being directed to hold in mind those other lines of Housman’s? Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it. Just such a shambles is evoked at ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”