“... the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as ...”

“... Glendinning puts it, by ‘a committee of aunts’. There was no shortage of cousins, Irish and English. One of them, Audrey Fiennes, became her lifelong friend and confidante.Bowen was later to recall that transplantation to England at an early and impressionable age established a ‘cleft’ in her between ‘heredity’ and ‘environment’. Heredity ...”

“... course of 1900, before either of her children had left home, she began a relationship with another English teacher, a woman called Mary Norcross, younger than her, a friend of the family, again ‘our kind’. Being in love with a woman, sleeping together, sometimes living together: none of it was a big deal, Leavell stresses: there was a lot of that sort of ...”

“... funny business, complaining that ‘Dogleaf, or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and ...”

“... race, amongst us, yet not of us. And the East End produces no type of man or woman so unfit, un-English, and morally and personally so alien as the pauper immigrant.’ Bengali immigrants are thought of as the most impoverished and the most recent arrivals in the East End. In fact, they have been coming here for over two hundred years. Throughout the 19th ...”

“... ago we had Bertrand Russell: The Psychobiography of a Moralist by Andrew Brink, a lecturer in English at McMaster who helped to edit Volumes I and XII of the Collected Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in ...”

“... US Embassy, ‘is that there’s lots of money for voter education. The bad news is that we hear Richard Gere and Kim Basinger are coming out to spend it.’ ‘It’s getting like the late Sixties in Vietnam,’ said his colleague. ‘Last time I saw so many people working such frantic hours on politics. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the ...”

“... problems, and apparently Young is one of them. He has sampled a number of prominent contemporary English and American philosophers and dutifully quotes Hare, Davidson, Mackie, Dennett, Ayer and so forth, as well as other, more traditional figures, in order to provide a context for the scientific information. But his comments on what he quotes, and his ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... Ukrainian conflict. ‘I am spelling Kiev and Odessa in the way they have always been spelled in English and don’t feel the need to take what many regard as a political stance by switching to the Ukrainian Kyiv and Odesa,’ Judah reports with some exasperation, in an afterword to his book. Indeed, his assertion that history ‘weighs very heavily on ...”

“... family life that now brings the shout, ‘Oh, just like the 1950s!’ from visitors to such English seaside resorts as Southwold and Frinton. A few years later, however, we could look into the rear-view mirror and see the 1960s, the Swinging Sixties, unquestionably the most famous ten-year stretch of world history. Yet the 1960s didn’t happen ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... It yields such truths as that before there were human beings there were trees and rocks; that the English phrase ‘the sun’ refers to a certain star; that our theory that we live on a planet in the galactic system is true because we live on such a planet. Such formulae can express our scientific and other knowledge, but they give no general philosophical ...”