“... was G.M. Trevelyan’s textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the ...”

“... beautiful comparison to Siamese cats could be the beginning of a poem, as the reference to Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting suggests, but it didn’t happen. He says – it’s 1955 – that his ‘head is full of ideas for poems, these days, but they vanish as soon as I sit down’. He often asks Monica’s views on his poems and her ...”

“... was working on at the time of his death in the Marquesas Islands was of a Breton church under snow. This wasn’t, by Segalen’s lights, the homesick act of an unhappy man at the end of his tether, but a sovereign gesture of the born traveller, the ‘Exote’ (his coining), caught up in the ‘poised two-way play’ (‘ce double jeu ...”

“... of season four of Mad Men opens in 1964, somewhere in New York State. Luxurious flakes of snow fall on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left ...”

“... out all his satirical skill. The mixture of ventriloquism and moral insight which he showed in his Edward Pygge parodies is now employed at length to create a fast-moving circus of follies and fantasies which is an acute pleasure to read. It doesn’t matter whether you know the persons James is writing about – the particular becomes the generic in his ...”

“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength ...”

“... Irene throws her cigarette out of a high window; we watch the ‘tiny spark drop slowly’ to the snow. Then Jack turns up at the party and accuses Clare, who is standing next to the window: ‘So, you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!’ Irene ‘ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm’. What ...”

“... cultural antennae, as well as an indicator of an obvious affinity, that he could describe C.P. Snow’s (thin and tendentious) ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as ‘one of the most important philosophical essays to appear since the war’. He not only shared Snow’s enthusiasm for industrialism as the route to improving the ...”

“... Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to Abruzzi. The first time he is at the villa housing the British Hospital he is upstairs drinking two glasses ...”

“... primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude ...”

“... Marxist-psychoanalytic-artworld nonsense and agreed with their own mindlessly reasonable practice. Edward Lucie-Smith even seemed to claim personal credit for setting Fuller on the right course: In Fuller’s early, hard-line Marxist days … I once told him that I would respect his criticism more a. if he wrote in a better style, and b. if he showed some ...”

“... Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’. As ...”

“... For a Russian soldier, the Caucasus was the warm, southern equivalent of Scott’s Highlands: an Edward Waverley from Moscow or St Petersburg might expect adventure, romance, intrigue, death. The mountains of the region were fabled (Noah’s ark was supposed to have passed through the twin peaks of Mount Elborus). Beyond the natural border of the River Terek ...”

“... and wake your father.’ My mother. When we say life we often mean risk. 12 April, Yorkshire. Snow in the night, which covers the lawn and clinging to the half-opened leaves makes the trees bulky and seemingly as laden with blossom as in a Samuel Palmer. In the afternoon we go over to Austwick and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are ...”