“... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...”

“... came to be the provision of music, which is fascinatingly discussed by Stanford Lehmberg. George Herbert went twice a week to Salisbury Cathedral, ‘and at his return, he would say that his time spent in prayers and cathedral music elevated his soul and was heaven on earth.’ Cathedral choirs sang the difficult music of Tallis, Byrd and Weekes: Lehmberg ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... pact between the Tories and the Lloyd George Liberals, now semi-detached from the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the ...”

“... Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing. Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up at Emma ...”

“... Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are ...”

“... Allies and the subsequent occupation of Rome by German forces, Heinrich Himmler sent an order to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the capital city: ‘All Jews,’ it said, ‘without regard to nationality, age, sex or condition, must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.’ On 16 October, SS officers, armed with addresses for Rome’s ...”

“... made to smuggle some sense of direction or progress back into this account – the ambiguity of Herbert Spencer’s coinage ‘the survival of the fittest’ allowed many to see it as a constant process of improvement – but the strict logic of Darwin’s mechanism didn’t warrant any such comforting inference: chance dictated the appearance of ...”

“... and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used ...”

“... on piecework. Henry had died in Cardiff some time before the birth of Rose’s fifth child, Herbert, in 1896; Stella died of tuberculosis in Bedminster in 1903 aged thirteen.Bristol ‘appeared to wear history on its surfaces’. The Home and Colonial Tea Stores opened a branch in Bedminster in 1903; Guinea Street by the Avon was a reference to the ...”

“... of all creativity. Here he could chat happily with such companions as Beethoven about the music of Herbert Howells, his schoolboy friend and fellow music student; or could by turns become Schubert, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Traherne, Whitman, even Gurney – anyone, musician or author, whose work he understood to the point of loving. ‘The idea that he had written ...”

“... as if he had been rushing towards his death for a long time. Talking about watching Pollock work, Herbert Matter said: ‘The way he stood, the way he looked at the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of a farmer.’ For Pollock the identification was precise. He spoke of memories that would come to him as he worked of standing by his father ...”

“... on the great issues of our time. In The Great War and Modern Memory he quotes with enthusiasm David Jones’s dodgy-sounding dictum that ‘the artist in man is the infantryman in man ... all men are aboriginally of this infantry, though not all serve with this infantry ... continued employment “away from the front” has made habitual and widespread a ...”

“... number of fairly obvious reasons, and the spirited Lady Agnes had gone off with a young man called Herbert Flower. He was the man she really loved, but he died suddenly at the age of 27. Neither parents nor society were at all forgiving, and in getting over her grief Lady Agnes once again showed spirit and resource. She went to London and took a humble job at ...”