“... and Leon Litwack, were scathing, but, for the most part, the book’s tone was measured; Burns and Geoffrey Ward, who had written the film’s script, contributed replies. But a funny thing happened as Burns made more documentaries: instead of making more of the views of historians, he shunted them to the sidelines. For all its faults, The Civil War featured ...”

“... designed by the RCA’s head of glass, Lawrence Lee, and his former students Keith New and Geoffrey Clarke, were being constructed nearby at the V&A. When they were exhibited in the sculpture hall their monumental scale made a huge impact on the students. As one of Boty’s contemporaries put it, ‘Painting? Too small!’ There was also the fact that ...”

“... of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise Glück, for ...”

“... the sovereign centres. Throughout the 1930s, Day-Lewis’s work attracted the usual venom from Geoffrey Grigson and the usual unsparing criticism from F.R. Leavis, but his consecration in the eyes of a wider public had come with T.E. Lawrence’s judgment in conversation with Winston Churchill, as reported in the Evening Standard in 1934, that Day-Lewis ...”

“... the religious life of England. That damning appraisal was most clearly set out in the late Geoffrey Dickens’s The English Reformation (1964), which dominated the historiography for thirty years. Dickens distilled his overwhelmingly negative picture into the claim that the Marian regime, bedevilled by an ‘arid legalism’, had ‘failed to discover ...”

“... profession was her voice. She was an assistant professor of oral English at Simmons, Scripps and Smith Colleges, and taught elocution and voice training for actors. Yet speech between Emily and Tom was rare. One opening for talk came when Eliot went to the US to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard in October 1932. He telephoned Hale on arrival. Fortunately ...”

“... Pygge was outrageous. Pygge attacked everybody, mercilessly.I remember a very funny take-off of Geoffrey Hill. Written by you, I believe. It was called ‘The Hallstein Gospel’. An accompanying note claimed it had been found on a crumpled scrap of paper outside the poet’s window. He had discarded it, the note said, because it was ‘too cravenly ...”

“... her predated Major’s rise. Its origins lay in her troubled relationship with Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the two most important members of her government. It turned, as did so much about her fall, on the question of Europe. Both Howe, who was foreign secretary (until Major replaced him), and Lawson, who was chancellor (until Major replaced him a few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in her search for new ideas she could bring to the fight. She read heavyweight books – Adam Smith, Burke, Popper, Hayek – and carefully noted their contents. She enjoyed talking about these writers when she got the chance. But did she really understand them? One of the questions that has always dogged Thatcher is whether she was intellectually ...”

“... in the book has a through-line, it is the battle of his ‘I’ with his ‘want’. Father Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we move. WE FUCKING HURTLE THROUGH SPACE LIKE THREE MAGNIFICENT BRAKE-FAILED BANGERS, thank you, Geoffrey, and send my love to Jean.’ The ability to function at some level shouldn’t be confused with the acceptance posited as the final stage by the Kübler-Ross model. Emerson could hardly be more emotionally present in his journal entries for January ...”

“... at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he ...”