“... followed that, dark shapes swinging among the beams. So it is not like Otley which just nurtured Thomas Chippendale who made chairs. No, we are not a serious people, as how should we be? Espiessac, 26 August. After years of sniggering English tourists having themselves photographed next to the town sign, the burghers of Condom have at last woken up to the ...”

“... Kelly, now made available to us again in this edition of O’Brien’s Plays and Teleplays. Daniel Keith Jernigan, the book’s editor, oddly claims in the body of his introduction that the play ran at the Abbey Theatre for ‘nearly two months’ in 1943, though he adds in a footnote that Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp, in Flann O’Brien: An ...”

“... After a considerable pause he says: ‘I’m afraid that on this occasion I can only agree.’ Thomas Hobbes, political philosopher and inveterate royalist, has always had his admirers and loathers: from the moment his greatest work, Leviathan, was published in 1651, he has attracted reverence and spite, though rarely indifference, in equal measure. But ...”

“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”

“... he coedited with René Hague, and forbade their publication during his own lifetime. Now, however, Thomas Dilworth has edited them as Wedding Poems. It’s a handsome-looking volume. There are photographs of Jones and the Grisewoods along with reproductions of some of Jones’s paintings of the time. There is also extensive critical and biographical commentary ...”

“... drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s handmaid and scrounging talent’s privilege does not come to your mind ...”

“... the impression of waiting for the other to move. Hitchens’s two main informants in Washington, Thomas Boyatt, who was at the time the Director of Cypriot Affairs at the Department of State, and Elias Demetracopoulos, who was an immensely energetic one-man lobby in favour of the democratic opposition to the Greek junta, are obviously highly indignant at ...”

“... am I alone in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he ...”

“... recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in acronymic self-torture. If the present Government’s narrow range of useful and acceptable disciplines means that anthropology and sociology ...”

“... never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book deal with Thomas, one relating him to Frost, the other to the English tradition – a sturdier strain of poetry than either the Georgian mode prevalent at the time Edward ...”

“... yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from ...”

“... authority as essentially the authority of continuing traditions. One question, therefore, which Keith Thomas’s series must confront at the start is simply whether for us as moderns any continuing traditions do (or even could) retain their authority. (An entire school of sociologists, for example, seeks to define modernity as a categorical denial of ...”

“... that we know from our anthologies – a literature in the main written by non-combatants. Only Keith Douglas – in places, in his prose – comes near to rivalling the raw repulsiveness that distinguishes the war memoir of one Eugene Sledge, a US Marine who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa. Sledge gives us the ‘bitterest essence of war’, with no literary ...”

“... the Houses of Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is abundant, for chamber pots. Shit, like nothing, happens anywhere, these utopian writers seem to say, but what matters is keeping it localised. Utopia is now five hundred years old. First published in Leuven ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”