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“... those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with artists ...”

“... found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same litanies of complaint, distress and need that fill Vivienne and Tom’s letters to ...”

“... was living on £46,000 a year, Mandelson borrowed £373,000 (eight times his MP’s salary) from Geoffrey Robinson, an industrialist Blair put in the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian ...”

“... has succeeded in developing – or even rescuing – the concept of the labour aristocracy. Thus Geoffrey Crossick, in his important recent study An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society, insisted that the labour aristocracy was no myth. He located it especially in the engineering industry and found evidence of the distinctive life-style of the skilled ...”

“... him up to a respectable £593,000 a year. The chairman of Bass’s remuneration committee was Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy, chairman of Kingfisher, whose own remuneration committee decided he was worth an equivalent rise, bringing him to £ 1.3m a year. Kingfisher’s committee was chaired by Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, whose own remuneration committee decided ...”

“... as strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great ...”

“... beach in baskets until the tenants relented in 1857. In the 1960s, the eminent landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe was invited to produce an island development plan; Chief Pleas rejected it. Fear of incurring debt persists to this day, and Sark has a statute prohibiting it. When the dame acceded in 1927, she boasted that it was probably the only government ...”

“... tightly reined and rather academic poet moved by imagery of kirk and court, rather like a Scottish Geoffrey Hill: Day updawis, shaddois flee Be thou as the Hairt tae me Upon the high hill Bethery Blintering floor o’ Sharon’s rose Like glaur and stoor warld’s glory goes Tae haud nor bield it nae man knows ... For all their delicacy, such poems look ...”

“... Kermode also notices that this transgressive interest goes both ways. The proletarian writer Lewis Jones, whose novels portray political struggles at a Welsh mine, praises the enviably ‘magnificent body’ of the coal-owner’s son. Kermode’s argument is built on an implicit contrast between relations of love and relations of power, and between the ...”

“... for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British ...”

“... passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip ...”

“... compared with his creative peers – Larkin, Heaney, or the greatest ‘maker’ of his generation Geoffrey Hill, with his confessedly ‘deficient sense of the anecdotal’ – that is where he belongs. From that early fabling phase, when Sylvia Plath heard about ‘a little wizard named Snatchcraftington, who looks like a stalk of rhubarb’, through Wodwo ...”

“... weakened by defeat in the first Commons vote on Maastricht – and Thatcher, taken down by Geoffrey Howe in 1990 for undermining Britain’s negotiators in Brussels. By then her Euroscepticism had surged. But for ten years she had been keen to stay inside the tent, pissing in, if necessary. This is hard to remember now that a crew of no-nation Tories ...”

“... who represented swashbuckling capitalism; Keith Joseph, who represented high-minded anti-statism; Geoffrey Howe, who represented disciplined proto-monetarism. But she saw them all off easily. In this she was greatly helped by their obvious lack of leadership qualities. Du Cann was cavalier and untrustworthy; Joseph was flaky and depressive; Howe was deadly ...”

“... Palmer has generally been well served by his modern biographers. The landmark in the field is Geoffrey Grigson’s Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), still highly readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters ...”