“... his coronation had to be postponed due to appendicitis brought on by over-eating. His biographer, Sidney Lee, faced with this utter grossness, wrote only that the King-Emperor ‘never toyed with his food’. This is, in a very strict sense, false consciousness: faced with the reality of monarchy, people simply lie. Similarly, Nairn catches Kinnock at the ...”

“... best commentary on this aspect of Hitchcock’s films (and on a great deal else besides) may be Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, a poem about the specific, all-consuming fear aroused by the most general and unavoidable (that is to say, banal) of all conditions. This is the fear not so much of dying, as of death, of mortality. Waking at 4 a.m. to ‘soundless ...”

“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... to discourage Stallworthy from submitting himself further to Kipling, Housman, Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas. I find it strange that Tosswill sent him to Yeats and, in another letter, to Hopkins and Melville, writers to whom he was likely in any event to become addicted. No talk of much Eliot, much Empson, or much Pound, though ‘practice ...”

“... mind while the context in which it was written does not. Even the younger generation got in first: Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell (1979) and Michael Foot’s of Aneurin Bevan (1962-73) also long predate Clarke. Cripps’s biographer, as Clarke admits, faces the further problem that the Governments in which Cripps served – and his years as ...”

“... System, no Plan”, he lived from hand to mouth and unceremoniously where Yeats – and Sidney – fed deliberately and ritually, in the heart’s rag and bone shop. And one might say that when he had consumed the roughage of his Monaghan experience, he ate his heart out.’The need to go back, the need to develop at last a literary parish in ...”

“... Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging the disturbed boy without condescension. ‘Now you will have to write back, as you promised,’ he ...”

“... the actual human task’. But Seidel simply responded with Samuel Johnson’s line, borrowed from Sidney (who got it from Horace), that poetry must please and instruct. Fair enough: so what are his poems instructing us? ‘That’s for you to say.’ At least I think this is how the conversation went: when I sat down to transcribe the interview, I ...”

“... who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads ...”

“... every sense characters of their own have their Nabokov books: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, though Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, which has all the right ingredients, was surely conceived mystically between the author and God, without Nabokov’s mediation. Still, Spark put her finger on the reason Nabokov’s ...”

“... This is what morality was invented to help us deal with. ‘It seems to me,’ he writes to Philip Hobsbaum in 1966, ‘that the chief function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people are very various, many of them quite different from you, with different “systems of value” as well; but the effect of almost any orthodoxy ...”

“... the ‘rapid multiplication of the unfit’. Progressives like Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were swayed by these arguments, at least for a time; and Ellis (while condemning the Nazis’ racism and anti-semitism) defended Hitler’s ideas on compulsory sterilisation as late as 1937. The coming world state in Anticipations was called the New ...”

“... concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit. But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of ...”

“... himself a successful artist. Peggy Guggenheim had shown his work and he found a reliable dealer in Sidney Janis. In a division reminiscent of the Jewish neighbourhoods in Portland, Rothko was now one of the respectable ‘uptown boys’, with Newman and Gottlieb and Motherwell, rather than the bohemian riffraff downtown. They wore suits and ties instead of the ...”

“... Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation of and notes on Dante. He also had an influence on Sidney Keyes, Vernon Watkins, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson, and on the undergraduate Philip Larkin, who admired his lecturer’s novels. Victor Gollancz and L.H. Myers, both given to occult speculations, were fans of the ...”