“... the history of the Left – by studying the history of theory are in danger of anachronism. As Henry Drucker pointed out in The Doctrine and Ethos of the Labour Party, a gulf always existed between the thinkers quoted in set-pieces – Marx, Tawney, Orwell and the rest – and the trade-union argot of the smoke-filled rooms, where decisions were ...”

“... his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure’. Phrases ...”

“... wants to link this up to a strand in Scottish philosophical history, encapsulated in the work of Thomas Reid (1710-96) on common sense, in which trusting one’s faculties, investing belief in one’s natural judgment, is fundamental – and a universal given to mankind. As Kelman has it, Chomsky’s Cartesian common sense tradition and the Scottish common ...”

“... The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from estates remaining for ever or for a long time inalienable or untransferable [would be] a damp to industry and a prejudice to trade.’ The mischief caused by ...”

“... of occupation.’ As recently as 25 September 2001, three former American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness ...”

“... lug through the streets and to the city’s outlying neighbourhoods. In the mid-19th century, Henry Mayhew estimated that five thousand hawkers descended on Covent Garden on a busy Saturday, ready to carry away the produce in barrows and baskets for distribution across the city. Hawkers bought cheap, with some waiting until the end of selling hours to ...”

“... Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the martyrdom of Becket and 34 from the ...”

“... that needs to be borne in mind. There are a lot of 16th-century sonnets. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished; some is haunting, such as ...”

“... wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry.’ Housman originally planned to publish A Shropshire Lad anonymously as Poems by Terence Hearsay, and ‘Terence’ (after his exilic namesake, the Latin playwright brought to Rome as a slave) is one of many who trudge this landscape – locals and ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... what kind of people should be judges, a question recently addressed to excellent effect by Sir Thomas Legg. Of course, one is intuitively in favour of a ‘representative’ judiciary or one which ‘reflects’ the sort of people – in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, social class and so on – that we find living on these islands. But Legg’s Street ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the ...”

“... than anyone else currently writing to give up, putting them in the position of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, who hears Glenn Gould play and realises that although he is gifted enough as a performer to attend the same piano masterclass in Salzburg, there is simply no point in making any more efforts in that line. He gives away his Steinway ...”