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“... and wanted to pore over the details of his marital agonies with friends. On a long journey with Herbert and Edith Gold, he ‘wailed and wept as we drove’, according to Herbert: ‘His need was exclusive, unflagging, draining.’ But Leader never trusts a single view; he checks letters and does interviews and finds that ...”

“... view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and now, somewhere, we might add, Bishop with Moore and Lowell. It eliminates nothing that literature confronts – ‘deaths, deaths and sicknesses’, all the flowing and flown ...”

“... that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... to describe Leon Brittan is likely to suspect that Zander’s relativities are lopsided. (A.P. Herbert would have likened it to the 13th chime of the clock – not only suspect in itself but casting doubt on everything that has preceded it.) And a look at Hillyard’s and Percy-Smith’s chronicle of Brittan’s record on the parole system, detention ...”

“... it. Or at least that is the idea. In his poem ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert imagines a new sort of howl which might come out of that musical contest. The tone is cool, a little sceptical and very Polish, well aware of the nature of experiences which art can or maybe cannot encompass. At any rate, the kind of art that knows it is ...”

“... classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now in his fifties and therefore appears to be viewed by some Lib Dem members as already past it.) No doubt they were the leading political talents among ...”

“... self-interested – rather than statesmanlike – motivations of 18th-century politicians, while Herbert Butterfield pointed out the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional narratives. Later, K.B. McFarlane applied Namier’s insights to the 15th century, diverting attention from the constitution to the political elite and the ...”

“... not the exhibition pictures of the Salon painters, that held sway. It wasn’t just a matter of size. If a picture is to be seen all the time, a degree of disengagement, an absence of overt emotion, will give it a better chance of holding its place. When Modernism of one kind or another suggested new ways of representing things, or of making ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The most constant members of the group during this period were Bonamy Dobrée, F.S. Flint, Herbert Read and Orlo Williams, all of whom were frequent contributors (and, therefore, frequent recipients of letters from Eliot), with several others participating more sporadically. In practice, Eliot still seems to have made the decisions and carried on the ...”

“... powerful enough to command assent. I balk pleasurably at a few marginal things, but find only one matter that might be considered centrally, as a moot point. Spufford himself touches on it when he says, of lists, ‘My own inclination is to think of them as a rhetorical figure – like hyperbole, say, or zeugma – an essentially humble figure that can be ...”

“... undergraduate studying English at Edinburgh University around 1930 when the influence of Professor Herbert Grierson was so potent. Under that influence, and in response to the impact of Eliot, MacLean became for a time a Donne-worshipper. He also wrote English poems in the style of Eliot and Pound, particularly the Pound of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. One can ...”

“... though her text has paid it little heed). It is no more than human bad luck that her Herbert Horne suddenly turns into Henry and then reverts to his correct name, and that she says that Ricketts and Shannon lived in ‘The Vale, a cul-de-sac off King’s Road, Chelsea’ without adding for the benefit of pilgrims that, although The Vale is often ...”

“... says that the stories ‘are not presented word for word in every detail’, he understates the matter. Perhaps one should not quibble about such details – it is not unreasonable, after all, that Job should be seen as prefiguring the sufferings of Christ – yet the liberties taken in this particular case raise questions about the whole typological ...”

“... no general introduction in English to what was produced in Germany or Italy. France is a different matter. Much of what was made between Houdon and Rodin has actually been admired for many years now: for instance, La Dance, Carpeaux’s festive group of girls with darting eyes and flashing teeth and flying hair and dimpled flesh on the front of the Paris ...”