“... a different world. In 1910, Gurney and Howells attended the premiere, at the cathedral, of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and spent much of the night walking the streets, delighting in the ‘divine afterglow’ (Gurney’s phrase) of the music.Gurney won a scholarship to the Royal College and threw himself into his studies with an ...”

“... cancer that were diagnosed a few years after he quit. One of Beckett’s best discoveries is Dr Richard Stone, whose father, Joe Stone, had been Wilson’s GP since the 1940s – a job that the junior Stone took over for the last 12 years of Wilson’s life. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ ...”

“... making’ of Sir Arthur Bryant’s three-volume life – that is, a sort of apprentice Pepys only. Richard Ollard’s Pepys (1974) is less strangely proportioned from this point of view, but again there is a deliberate attempt to set the familiar Pepys in a context of broader aspiration and achievement. Much of the new Companion volume rehearses the findings ...”

“... and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many months ago answered Alistair Elliott’s more brutal review in the TLS – have every reason to wonder that Tomlinson should still solicit the suffrages of a public that shows him such ill-will. He must be, so it must seem, either ...”

“... the water supply in 1955, the year when the book began to write itself. It was in that year that Richard Hoggart completed The Uses of Literacy, though thanks to the tribulations of libel law it wasn’t published until 1957; that Ian Watt was giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond ...”

“... In​ The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... Alfred Kroeber’s explanation for the abolition of taboos: cultural fatigue. According to Raymond Williams’s classic account, the notion of ‘culture’ (which was invented only at the end of the 18th century) achieved its influence and intellectual authority by setting itself up as a standard against which capitalist or industrial modernity could be ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ‘Naive and Sentimental Opera Lovers’, writes about distinctions in operatic taste, the sources of the power of opera, what it is to be an opera lover, and Berlin’s responses to opera in ...”

“... monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has spewed his contempt for ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... a peasant-servant repeats the central plot-device of Godwin’s allegory of class conflict, Caleb Williams. These early reviewers simplified the book they had to deal with. Baldick’s more careful comparison of Mary Shelley’s protagonists with those of any model in the 1790s shows that her sympathies are unusually evenly distributed, her message complex ...”

“... a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of Keywords ...”