“... England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most useful descriptor is Whiggism, after Herbert Butterfield’s incisive dissection in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) of the tendency ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’. There ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wants to put Darwinian ideas to moral use but knows it’s no longer fashionable to sound like Herbert Spencer. Eugenicists believed that once we’d figured out that human nature was simply animal competition it was our duty to help the herd thin itself out. Science has corrected itself since then, and we now understand that just because a gene is selfish ...”

“... interior of All Saints, Margaret Street, but less predictably by the writings of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan. When it comes to sex he is for once almost apologetic, regretting that he had not been more open about his homosexuality in his early life but explaining that for a long time he had no real idea what homosexuality ...”

“... million Mexicans (half of whom were US citizens). The president that Chu is quoting was of course Herbert Hoover in 1932. Very little that Trump has actually done is without parallel in the Hoover years, and neither is the reaction from mainstream economic theory. A thousand economists delivered exactly the same message to Trump in 2018, making just as little ...”

“... that threatened to leave the elderly more vulnerable. Early 20th-century progressives such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann championed the cult of youth and the dismantling of established traditions and institutions. Under this regime the old could be seen as embodying past failure – symbols of what needed to be left behind. But now that wealth and ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... and textually. His model of the poet is not classical, but Biblical: not Orpheus, but Solomon and David, the two chief authors of what Sidney described (conventionally) as ‘the poetical part of the Scripture’. Those Biblical models were the foundation of what has been called a ‘Protestant poetics’, which shaped English poetry from Sidney and Spenser ...”

“... disputes and nearly three hundred maritime boundary disputes of which 49 were (and are) active. David Colson, a legal adviser in the State Department, observes that the Falklands crisis was ‘an example of how not to control or resolve a sovereignty dispute between states’: he goes on to relate how some countries have set aside doctrine and pride in ...”

“... miniatures of the uncontroversial heroism of doomed men. It’s beyond history; it’s myth. David Boyd Haycock’s I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women Who Went to Fight Fascism is a good example of where this Civil War mythology tends to wind up. He replaces Baxell’s careful scholarship with broad-brush sentimentality. They tell ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... read what he writes and not think of similarities between then and now. His book is in contrast to David Kynaston’s four-volume history of the City of London, which takes up the idea of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and portrays the Victorian era as a relatively sane and sober interlude.* Kynaston explains the hands-off policy in terms of esprit de corps. The ...”

“... had a reputation for enjoying popular culture. He once made a TV programme celebrating the work of David Byrne of Talking Heads. In 2008, it was reported in the nationals that he’d set an exam question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a ...”