“... theory: if Cobbett comes out with something illiberal, unscientific or backward-looking, he may be excused and the blame put on the primitive age in which he lived. There is, of course, something patronising about this. He was ‘the last great tribune of the agrarians’, wrote G.D.H. Cole, and, ‘by force of circumstances, also the first great ...”

“... and yet, as Luria says, they are of the most fundamental importance, so much so that they may demand a new sort of neurology, a ‘romantic science’, as he liked to call it. Luria thought a science of this kind would be best introduced by a story – a detailed case-history of man with a profound right-hemisphere disturbance, a case-history which ...”

“... about it: in a Borrowdale climbing hut the other day I found the handwritten note of what may have been their last mountain walk in England, in the same logbook as my eldest son’s record of some of his first hard routes. This long tradition (it starts with Coleridge’s tense letter describing his downclimbing of Broad Stand on Scafell in ...”

“... Mr Rhodes James manages to be both informative and discreet about his parentage (his real father may have been George Wyndham) and the failure of his first marriage. Yet all too soon he is on the defensive, acquitting Eden of vanity and arrogance and repeatedly listing his qualities. There is no doubt that Eden was in many ways an honourable and admirable ...”

“... the name Tom was disconcerting because Mosley didn’t seem to be one of nature’s Toms. One may speak of the demonology of Mosley without implying that there was not indeed a great deal, hideously much, that was demonic about him: that said, it can be admitted that ‘Sir Oswald’ was and is a powerful contributor to the demonology. It is not only that ...”

“... quality and outlook, much to be valued in a land which had long been looking for a voice. This may well be so, though one would hate to be called on to identify a Canadian joke. Leacock said he would rather have written Alice in Wonderland than the Encyclopedia Britannica, but there were sixth-formers (of whom this reviewer was one) who would rather have ...”

“... periodicals. It acquired considerable influence and circulation before its shutdown in May 1863, as well as keeping the heads of the brothers Dostoevsky above water financially. Both brothers were heroes, in terms of the efforts they made and the volume of work they undertook, but the elder, Mikhail, was the more heroic of the two, and when he died ...”

“... for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial ...”

“... of the troubles with introductions, with images and masks, is that their implicit defensiveness may lead to a kind of stiffness, an inability to go beyond formality. Ashbery, who likes to think about identity in terms of flow, has always worried about our projections of ourselves hardening too much, as a passage from ‘The New Spirit’, one of his long ...”

“... of Mozart’s Dissonance String Quartet (K.465, in C), which, as Maynard Solomon intimates, may partly have inspired Haydn’s vision of loss, leaves me comparatively unmoved. And it is the same with the String Quintet in G minor (K.516) and the Fantasy in C minor (K.475) and the B minor Adagio (K.540). In the face of these pieces I am like Coleridge ...”

“... of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways and eventually into the post-voicemail void. Now, there was ...”

“... to advertise their prospective clients in this way? Elsewhere among the crosses and headstones one may find Upton Sinclair, Nobel laureate and defeated Socialist candidate for the governorship of California, Alice Warfield Mien (mother of Wallis Simpson) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grande dame of Washington dynastic bitchery. (She had a motto emblazoned on ...”

“... much as in the vividness of his most striking imagery.’ ‘The requisite degree of incipience’ may, like other critical formulations of Leavis’s, have an oddly bureaucratic sound, but it is an accurate description of a power that Shakespeare developed, occasionally almost over-developed, in the plays after Hamlet. Any admirer could multiply ...”

“... rallyin’, rippin’ an’ choppin’ an’ burnin’ is obviously terribly good stuff. Socialism may have disappeared from the agenda but the onward march of the masses seems to be still in full spate, very much as depicted in those giant Socialist Realist murals which the Eastern masses are now, some-what less progressively, tearing down. But the way ahead ...”

“... to Russia. ‘It’s my mother,’ she quotes an elderly trade unionist as declaring: ‘She may be a whore, she may be a thief, she may be a junkie. But she’s my mother. I’m not going to throw her out or leave her on the streets.’ Few in Frognal had much time for ...”