“... Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, the wife of Theodore (Ted) Morrison, a lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard. Since this fact (documented in Thompson’s ‘Notes’ and now further documented thanks to the co-operation of Kay Morrison’s daughter) was made known by Frost to many bystanders, and broadly hinted at by previous commentators on Frost, it ...”

“... completely instinctive obsessional thing’. In 1969 Faber published The Bog People, the English translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in ...”

“... of the school day, among plane trees and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. It’s all rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters … North of the square you find Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable 18th-century Georgian townhouses. This was once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet … The location radiates ...”

“... a Contemporary’. The voice’s inflections are, if we like, upperclass or at least authoritarian English of the reader or writer’s own period, with a powerful assurance written in every phrase, as in that still encountered idiom by which proprietorship is signalled by the addition of ‘my’ to properties sometimes unexpected: my plumber, my milkman, my ...”

“... more subtle and peculiar sense it is true of a great poet-artist like Pasternak. The tradition in English is different: the greatness in poetry of a Yeats or an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ‘views’, or upon their self-appointed role in society. Their legend is personal, not exemplary, and their achievement as poets is ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him in good stead much of the time. He ...”

“... the Christmas season with murder plays, mostly dramatised detective stories from the classic English phase of the 1920s and 1930s. This joining of the festive with the lethal provokes thought. There may well be some long line in English culture that links the Christmas visit to The Mousetrap with a point at least as ...”

“... Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship between one class of Irishmen and another’, according to the historian of Sinn Féin Michael Laffan, quoted by Diarmaid Ferriter in his recent book A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish ...”

“... respectable matron, favoured member of Swift’s literary circle (he taught her the good use of English by pinching her black and blue when she misspoke), Grub Street hack and ghostwriter for hire who figuratively hung out her sign – a literary version of Aphra Behn’s courtesan Angellica – across the street from that famous haunt of ‘titled drunks ...”

“... school in Pennsylvania, where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the instructions of our ...”

“... for many of the arguments about hostility to industry recently expounded by Martin Wiener in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Women are another group who seem peripheral to this male and mandarin world. In explaining why there were so few of them in the earliest volumes of the DNB, Lee noted that ‘women’s ...”

“... since it cannot now be claimed, as Sidgwick did in 1899, that ‘there is no elementary manual of English manufacture by which a student may learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least possible trouble,’ we might as well relax: the extravagant ambition has gone, the subject is domesticated, and its adherents may safely graze. There is ...”

“... stopped them. Behind the old confidence lay a peculiar history. The idea of a civil service is an English idea, but its origins do not lie in England. The first ‘civil servants’ were the administrators of the East India Company’s ‘military servants’. It wasn’t only the label that distinguished them from their counterparts in early 19th-century ...”

“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”