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“... be inward. Nesbit’s heroes are unlike those of her contemporaries (she died in the same year as Frances Hodgson Burnett) in having not only character but forceful personalities. They are irritable, embarrassable, funny and ingenious. Gore Vidal has remarked that they are exactly like adults, ‘except for one difference. In a well-ordered and stable society ...”

“... For instance, in the opening pages, Super tells us that Trollope’s redoubtable mother, Frances Milton, was 29 when she married. Mullen hedges by saying that she was ‘already in her late twenties’. Hall declares ‘she was 30.’ Super tells us that one of the reasons Trollope’s father moved the family to Harrow in 1815 was that as residents ...”

“... called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale,’ he wrote in his brilliant book on Thomas Aquinas. In fact – and this is what makes Chesterton so much more delightful a writer than Belloc – everything he wrote was ‘subjective’, everything in his prose, whether it is the poetry of Browning which is being considered or the intellectual ...”

“... her career. The newspapers, by her own account, included almost daily notices of her activities; Thomas Lawrence’s sketch of her appeared in shop windows and was printed in miniature on men’s neckerchiefs; plates and saucers were decorated with images of her Juliet, as well as her Belvidera in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d. According to a memoir written a ...”

“... soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary and modern estimations an English ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood ...”

“... plaster casts as well as volumes of John Bell’s Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body. Frances Reynolds, Joshua Reynolds’s younger sister, explained to the Academician James Northcote that she did, out of propriety, ‘draw all her figures cloath’d’, except infants, ‘which she often paints from life’, Northcote reported, using ‘some ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his work on the philosophy of science anticipates, by more than thirty years, the discussion by Thomas Kuhn of ‘incommensurability’. His more general philosophical work, his discussions of belief, knowledge and causality, is today the subject of a renewed and growing interest among philosophers. A further claim to fame is that he was, at the age of ...”

“... Holkham is the immutable fact and she understands it entirely as it relates to her family. Thomas Coke (1697-1759), who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex ...”

“... prurient creature I was for the rest of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but ...”

“... defended Phillis Wheatley, subject of an essay in the Routledge volume, from the racist disdain of Thomas Jefferson (‘Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry’), repeated by Tyler. And she drew attention to figures, such as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells, who are increasingly read today for their contributions to political ...”

“... this lesson or transaction taking place in beer advertisements in all our countries.) The Clarence Thomas hearings, when the public had to watch the all-male Senate Committee browbeating Anita Hall, provided American women with an object lesson in their powerlessness. That that object lesson occurred was a subject of distress to the establishment, which needs ...”

“... from our thoughts, in the early 1970s British farming was in a pretty good state. J.G.S. and Frances Donaldson’s Farming in Britain Today, published around this time, just before Britain’s entry into the Common Market, expressed the view that a beautiful balance had been struck.Today agriculture is one of Britain’s most efficient industries. It has ...”