“... future by calling upon familiar dreams about the past, how closely they confine personal liberty. (William Morris is often cited as an exception in this last respect. But in his conviction that men do not really desire what they imagine themselves to want there is already the seeds of authoritarianism.) Ought we to regret, with the Manuels, the ...”

“... his 19th-century predecessors. It would, of course, make him more a Cobbett than a Burke, more a William Morris than an Evelyn Waugh. The destructive energy of capital seeking to maximise its returns is not going to be tamed by a spot of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. It is not going to be tamed by a spot of Anglicanism either, or any other form ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and ...”

“... Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her story. The first two-thirds of the book are based ...”

“... in southern Ukraine (either Odesa or Kherson), probably with the name Sigmund Rosenblum. Benny Morris – whose excellent short biography of Reilly is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series – is careful not to claim as fact anything about which there’s any doubt, and there’s a lot that’s doubtful in Reilly’s life. ‘Tracing the life of a spy is ...”

“... is caught on tape having a squabble with another spirit: Wagstaffe: This sceptred isle . . . Morris: My sceptred – Wagstaffe: This other Eden – Morris: My sceptred arse. The Britain of Beyond Black is a squalid nest of crumbling viaducts and graffiti-covered bridges, traffic-crazed towns, choked slip roads, sewage ...”

“... Association (DIA), the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), the National Trust, William Morris’s old Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and elsewhere, with the old ‘Amenity Brigade’, as he was to call it. There can hardly have been a conservation or planning society in his lifetime in which he was not active, if not ...”

“... a family.’ This view is no longer held in its crude state, and sophisticated work by Colin Morris and other Medievalists has made a strong case for the 12th century, with its ‘Renaissance’, as the era of the discovery of individual self-consciousness. If a biography of a Medieval figure is to be attempted, the 12th century offers a fruitful ...”

“... and it has never been out of official custody. It is the report of a royal commission ordered by William the Conqueror to conduct a stocktaking survey of the great Anglo-Norman feudal estates of his realm of England as they stood 20 years after the Conquest: a report based on the corroborative evidence of six villagers, the priest and the steward from each ...”

“... to contribute to a debate about Existentialism. And then there was my awful first encounter with Morris Shapira, one of the Downing English dons. He was extremely sophisticated, wore sandals and a sort of kimono, and displayed a few Chinese objets d’art in his almost empty white room. He served Chinese tea, which didn’t taste like tea at all. The ...”

“... the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had happened in the months following the shipwreck – accusing one another of mutiny, murder and betrayal.By the mid 18th century, tales of nautical ...”

“... in the circles in which Williams the adult education tutor moved, but scarcely more so than William Morris, still a powerful living presence in the Labour movement into the 1950s. And although for a generation or more now, Leavis has, if mentioned at all, been routinely dismissed by literary theorists as irretrievably conservative and parochial, he ...”

“... the girl to the absorbing society of transplanted Anglo-America. Taken to the hospitable home of William Wetmore Story in Rome, a handsome apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, she met people who had known George Eliot, Thackeray, the Brownings. This, even at the age of 12, was a world where she felt instantly at home. Among the many details uncovered by ...”

“... state during the Boer War. Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including ...”

“... at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of native genius held in thrall by the hostile forces of trade – what Hill refers to at one point, in a Poundian spirit, as the ...”