“... on the crumbling ramparts of higher education, academics need to keep their powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social ...”

“... about the doctrine of divine right than the Stuarts did, not least that it failed to survive them for very long. Why should modernity define itself in purely temporal terms, rather than by reference to a cultural style, a mode of production, an intellectual climate, a reversion to the past or the sway of a particular monarch? The answer must surely be that ...”

“... patrons, especially the desire to maintain or improve their status, and on their influence on the form of the finished product, with particular attention being paid to conflicts between patrons and artists, exemplified on a heroic scale by the clash between the irresistible force, Pope Julius II, and the immovable object, Michelangelo. In the case of social ...”

“... from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an Oxford don had mistaken his university for the spiritual heart of humanity. A century later, a move against Old English in Oxford provoked one apocalyptically minded medievalist to warn of the ...”

“... and Faculty since 1926. I realised recently that I had been in contact with English at Cambridge for two-thirds of this history, since I came as an undergraduate in 1939. Moreover, for the last twenty years or so I have, in some problematic ways, been near the centre of its affairs. It is then at first sight curious that I ...”

“... and the Restoration of Charles II, all in the space of twenty years, might be forgiven for being confused about politics. As the journalist Marchamont Nedham put it in one of his ‘Letters from Utopia’ in 1657, There is no everlasting Principle in Government, as to any one particular Form. For, the Rules and ...”

“... the neck: that derives from the French town of Arras, which was from the later Middle Ages famous for its tapestries. My favourite bit of Hamlet is where the Player in his speech about Hecuba comes over all craftsmanly and urges the gods to attack the goddess Fortune and ‘Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,/And bowl the round nave down the hill ...”

“... view of the trial from the one Ellmann presents. It was not a cathartic and humbling metamorphosis for the poor victim but a smart triumph quite in his usual style. ‘Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell its name was simply wonderful – and carried the whole court right away – quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here ...”

“... Flame is that rarest of modern things, lit crit with laughs. Hamilton has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis – on such things as William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose – worthy of a stand-up comedian. Although it will find a home in that dreariest of Dewey Decimal deserts – the public reference section – this book is ...”

“... Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who probably had the longer record of relations with Moscow, was never tried though seen as heavily suspect by the British security services. As it happens, I knew or met all three as well as a very large percentage of the dramatis personae of this ...”

“... of a great deal of family life – sometimes as skeletons revealed, sometimes as skeletons for ever hidden. This view, I entirely accept. It has been my experience that most middle-class families have some “secret” of this kind in their midst.’ Ivy Compton-Burnett had published ten novels before the 33-year-old Angus Wilson sat down one Sunday ...”

“... Alfred Hitchcock is famous for planning everything beforehand, shooting his films in his head, never looking through the camera because he knew exactly what he would find. But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan ...”

“... at which literary critics and historians exchanged perspectives on a year conspicuous both for political conflict and for politically charged literature. Alas, it would take more than conferences for the two disciplines to understand each other. A number of the literary critics ...”

“... contemporaries came to the view that he wasn’t all there – the inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in ...”

“... Thomas himself speaking, but the unhappy daughter of the landlord of The White Horse, a pub not far from Steep in Hampshire, where Thomas and his family had settled seven years earlier. Like a number of Thomas’s earliest poems, ‘Up in the Wind’ began life as a prose sketch of the kind that feature in his numerous travel books, and its poetic ...”