“... the natural scientist John Tyndall, and many social scientists and social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Moreover, many who could not accept the whole package of Comtean positivism still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, for example, appear to have worked ...”

“... resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... Sister Bill had failed.) Victorian families (like all families) were a reliable source of tragedy (Charles and Emma’s adored Annie, three-year-old Noel Huxley, gone with no secure promise of extra reunion); but Huxley’s kindred provided an extra element of disreputable uproar. His father was a maths teacher in a small and failing public school: it ...”

“... a number of essays, directly or obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of ...”

“... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ‘brisk intelligent alacrity with ...”

“... by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone bed. ‘The only Western ...”

“... Dacre, long-time editor of the Mail, appointed as head of the media regulator, Ofcom; and to have Charles Moore, former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator (and still a columnist), appointed as chair of the BBC. In the end, he had to make do with putting them both in the Lords (Moore is happily ensconced; but ...”

“... in spite of the authoritative nature of their church.’ The second longest entry is on Henry Moore, that £1 million-a-year taxpayer whose sculpture was (and perhaps still is) prominently displayed in fifty cities and two hundred museums. Wisely, he retrained from philosophising and left the interpretation of his work to others. He was ‘the maker ...”

“... Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...”

“... the German model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of ...”

“... receptive to both, but immune to the enervating forces of each. Other Traditions, a series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989-90, is the poet’s most recent answer to the conundrum, and suggests that it is possible for an individual to consort with a tradition without becoming locked in an oedipal struggle or a fatal ...”

“... for ‘Treasury control’ over other departments’ spending. No one was keener on this than Charles Trevelyan, its chief civil servant from 1840 to 1859, who had made his reputation in India, aged 22, with a campaign against East India Company officials who took gifts.Yet it was impossible to root out all vested interests – not least because there ...”

“... he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had learnt their methods from G.E. Moore – Susan Stebbing and John Wisdom, for example – saw himself as above all in debt to and an adherent of the views and arguments of the Vienna Circle. But, in retrospect, what is remarkable is the extent to which he had already domesticated Austrian ...”

“... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...”

“... of Buster Keaton, W.B. Yeats, Abraham Cowley, a ‘Franco-Cantabrian Muralist’, Andy Warhol and Charles Babbage, among others. Davenport published his first book of short fiction (or ‘assemblages’ as he called it), Tatlin! Six Stories, as well as translations of the fragments of Archilochos (the first work by Davenport I encountered and was gripped ...”