“... corner of Victoria’s England is so very unlike what we know of it from Dickens and Mayhew, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell, it seems rather an unreal landscape. Quite fortuitously, while reading the book, I found in a Victorian journal telling criticism of one of the landed proprietors whose garden is described here in glowing terms, and whose head ...”

“... be more of a political hot potato: most of these drafts were being written in the years of the George W. Bush tax cuts. ‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say … Americans are in a way crazy. We ...”

“... for moderating the Glare of the Sun’. And then of course they are asked round for tea by Col. George Washington, you know, the land-surveyor and real-estate speculator, eager for his own reasons to network with these overseas visitors, whom he plies with kasha varnishkies and hemp. The delicacies are fetched by Gershom, Washington’s Jewish-African ...”

“... artist’s own photographs. Opposite the mud circles are some large pictures made by Gilbert and George. They also first attracted attention in the Sixties with a new conception of art, but of a different sort. Gilbert and George (we are not told their full names) went in for camp self-advertisement in the manner of Andy ...”

“... as good a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s ...”

“... won. Gavin Francis On​ the evening of Friday, 19 September, hundreds of loyalists congregated in George Square in Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up your arse.’ Expensive cars disgorged burly men from Ayrshire and Fife. A Rangers banner ...”

“... might be. Among such artists were Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Gilbert and George and others. Many of these people disliked each other. While their individual careers developed they found that they could not teach in the same studios. By the early Seventies this wonderful department was at war with itself. Obviously a standard ...”

“... who righteously derailed a charity telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ – visited the White House to see his good friend Donald Trump. ‘You know, my dad and mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that – you know, not ...”

“... sense whatever.’ And the Pre-Raphaelite line continues, right the way up to The Blue Flower, via George MacDonald, whose Phantastes inspired generations of grot-and-goblin writers, and who was the translator of the Hymns to the Night. In fact, MacDonald was the only English-speaking writer who ‘really understood’ Novalis, as she wrote in a letter to ...”

“... to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ...”

“... chapters on Shelley’s split political background. One part was formed by the radical Whigs, George Fox and the old republican roué the Duke of Norfolk, who proposed the notorious toast to ‘our Sovreign, the People’; the other by the new concept of the ‘democratic revolution’, with its French and American antecedents – Godwin, of course, Tom ...”

“... and teenage daughter spend a wonderful few weeks on their own together, reading Balzac, Zola, George Sand – ‘“All essential in their so various ways,” my mother told me firmly’ – and eating takeaway from the traiteur. Then comes the time to snuggle up for ‘lucidity, clarifications’: ‘There was much to chew over,’ Bedford explains. The ...”

“... the grain of the language is often a smoother, less arresting version of that of Edwin Muir or George Herbert. It’s hard to believe most of these poems were written in the last quarter-century. One distinguished contemporary poet scowled when I told him I was reading Jennings’s Collected Poems: ‘Life’s too short.’ As I read, though, I was ...”

“... and the colour of shadows. Such things were of as much interest to painters as scientists. Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843) is an example of a poetic response to a natural wonder which acknowledges (rather obscurely) the usefulness of analysis. More often ...”

“... who finds common ground with the pronouncements of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a ...”