“... him, but he had nowhere to go. He remembered the address of an acquaintance, a man called Josh Morris, who has a solid career in HR and owned a two-bedroom flat in Skyline Chambers, one of the smart new blocks close to the synthetic neighbourhood that property developers have branded ‘Noma’. But Morris, too, had just ...”

“... ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of Ruskin and Morris: the Ruskin who could write of a little girl he saw in ill-fitting hand-me-downs when he was lecturing in Oxford that ‘nothing spoken about art’ could be ‘of the least use’ to anyone in his audience. ‘For their primary business, and mine, was ...”

“... to the critic D.S. MacColl that he preferred photogravure to wood-cuts, ‘as he had no use for Morris’s hidebound mannerisms’, thereby jettisoning the artisanal foundation of Morris’s aesthetic. When a friend of Beardsley’s showed Morris a print from Le Morte D’Arthur, ...”

“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina ...”

“... note by the then director, Hugh Scrutton, dismisses the objections as the product of a ‘William Morris creed … unrealistic, romantic and naive’. The present exhibition omits to mention that the Whitechapel had itself been an expression of Arts and Crafts ideals, promoted by Morris’s friend Henrietta Barnett, who ...”

“... pluralist theories of political life’. The writers Inglis presents under this rubric are William Morris, T.H. Green, John Maynard Keynes, R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough ...”

“... for, doubtless with an eye to their principal business, Messrs Sotheby Parke Bernet have carried John Harris’s research in a heavy and lavish volume with 419 plates – some a little grey, alas, but there are 26 good ones in colour. This may not be the first book on the subject, but it is a scholarly work of great scope and interest. As Mr Harris explains ...”

“... allow for his personal reading temperament, his instinctive critical preferences and dislikes. John Banville roused my own antipathies as early as the second page of his novel: Kepler, arriving at a Bohemian castle, is greeted by a hump-backed dwarf who pipes, ‘God save you, gentles,’ and to make matters worse has second sight. When Tycho ...”

“... like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and overshadowed by its villains. Disraeli’s novels glorified Nathan and ...”

“... rain, nothing but the wild rain’: if anything, I’d say, Thomas understates. The nine men’s morris would be fill’d with mud, if the local farmer had left it. But he’s an improver who roots up hedgerows and demolishes old cottages. Not long ago, he gassed his badgers and bulldozed their set. They used to bring up Roman coins. Even Wat the Hare has ...”

“... aren’t always distinguishable from those who proclaim the gospel of ‘The March of Mind’. John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London, wanted to improve the practice of medicine, but thought this could be done partly by the use of mesmerism, and was exposed in the Lancet as a fraud – or possibly a dupe – in 1838. The high-minded ...”

“... and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave ...”