“... true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got ...”

“... ran the message, for doing bad things to Liverpool. Perhaps the day will dawn when Liverpool is said to hate someone for doing bad things to Aberystwyth or Krasnoyarsk. But then again it’s almost certain that she did do bad things to Liverpool. Another LRB writer, Peter Pulzer, delivered a still resented cut at her reputation when he led the successful ...”

“... and suddenly transformed them into royalists. We can get a taste of the growing unease from Sir Edward Dering, who had been on the side of the people in the execution of Strafford. ‘Mr Speaker,’ he said, ‘when I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful councillors, we should hold up a ...”

“... renamed Gerusalemme conquistata emerged from these debates in 1593. The kindest thing that can be said about it is that it is the product of much effort and conscientious thought. Tasso was probably mad; he was certainly a bad reviser. But he was not Ariosto in corsets. His response to writing a poem which really could not be written was to create scenes of ...”

“... for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is ...”

“... ally: the tomblike secrecy in which government was then conducted. The American sociologist Edward Shils pointed out that ‘the British ruling class is unequalled in secretiveness and taciturnity … No ruling class discloses as little of its confidential proceedings as does the British.’ Nothing leaked: not the lies the government told about how ...”

“... you propose a man’s health on his 359th [it was actually the 361st] birthday,’ Shaw said, ‘you may be sure that … what his health requires is country air … But Stratford wants a new theatre. The Memorial is an admirable building, adapted for every conceivable purpose – except that of a theatre.’ Shaw’s fellow governors felt it ...”

“... of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.’ Edward Gibbon.1 August, Yorkshire. A couple of years ago we planted some lychnis coronaria by the back gate, and in our prolonged absence this summer it has seeded itself in the stone trough by the back door, with a lone outpost in a crack between the paving ...”

“... the family next to us. ‘C’est le maréchal, il est mort, là-bas,’ the man of the family said, pointing to the horizon. Philippe Pétain died at 9.22 a.m. on 23 July 1951. He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for ...”

“... a single stray aside, seems to be that for Runciman the royal administrations of Hammurapi and of Edward the Confessor exceeded those of a patrimonial ruler. This is scarcely persuasive. Was the staff at the disposal of Henry VII, or the House of Avis, really less? Patrimonialism, one is forced to conclude, the least anchored of modes in the subjacent ...”

“... up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they surprisingly called ‘Platonism’: ‘the doctrine that the region between the earth and ...”

“... was a gesture which they felt they should make and were glad to make,’ an Irish official said.) There was a state funeral in Dublin. The coffin was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement ...”

“... poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had no idea ...”

“... and calling herself his ‘wife’. ‘My phantom slowly took on a bodily shape,’ Beauvoir said of the United States on the plane returning home. ‘I was happy when its heart was beating like a real human heart. Now, it’s becoming disembodied with dizzying speed.’ The American disembodiment was her own. Paris, she wrote to Algren in her first ...”

“... had not prepared them to hurry up, finish their studies and take ship to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and ...”