“... there) and had come to feel some Remains-of-the-Day-like affection for one of his supporters, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. Nothing came of it. She died of pneumonia early in 1937, and the Prof never loved again. Back on the committee, he seems to have behaved better, even being bracketed with Tizard in R.V. Jones’s account of the completion of the radar chain and ...”

“... not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing’), Maugham could, and did, point to his supersized audience, implying that you’d have to be very serious indeed to ...”

“... theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Kennedy starts, in fact, by telling us that he won’t concern himself ...”

“... thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle never held the great offices of ...”

“... sign of affection or respect. Noms de guerre such as ‘Auk’ (Auchinleck), ‘Jumbo’ (Maitland Wilson), ‘Weevil’ (Wavell) or, a more exotic specimen, ‘the Salamander’ (Churchill’s term for Freyberg, aka ‘Tiny’) stuck not only because they were apposite but because they introduced a certain intimacy between the high command and the ranks. But ...”

“... in the light of episodes concerning, Scottish writers, mostly of the 18th century: Tannahill, John Wilson of Greenock – and, in ‘Green Breeks’, a famous anecdote of Scott’s boyhood is subjected to an extremely deft and somewhat mean-spirited reversal. The volume as a whole gives a sense of substantial and sensitive gifts embarrassed by a strange ...”

“... to make his own, and original, despite the difficulty of its obviously novelish usefulness. Elizabeth Bowen did the same, believing with a certain inner passion, or so her novels indicate, that we remain secretly arrested by early and terminative emotional experiences, smoking away for the rest of our lives and perhaps relit at intervals. The Old Devils ...”

“... each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised Horizon’s survey, opted for ‘five pounds a day’ – £100 a day today: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuff’d ...”

“... Kirk; here are the Nicholses, Beverley and Mike; and you must distinguish, if you will, between Elizabeth Taylors one (actress), two (novelist) and three (friend of Gladys Calthrop). Wilde, Wilder and Wilding mark the beginning of the end; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor make 22 appearances: and in a trickle of Zanucks, Zinkeisens and Zolotows, the torrent ...”

“... successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London (and himself a future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in particular. It has been known since ...”

“... on Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential ...”

“... your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or even to ...”

“... for example, Armstrong reads his poems of the 1830s against more orthodox Tory productions by John Wilson, John Keble and Robert Montgomery, as well as some ‘vapid’ lyrics (the adjective is Tennyson’s) from the popular album collections of the period. Familiar works like ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (both 1832; revised 1842) appear ...”

“... 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 Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an indication of defensive ...”