“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... shows how distant visual phenomena can be described in close physical terms: The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn becomes One cold metallic grain is quivering still Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid. The fact that a blind poet could make the translation suggests that the problem was not one of ...”

“... in the prose. ‘The range and grasp of his mind is always evident in the present book,’ William Empson wrote in a review of the essay collection The Dyer’s Hand, quoted by Davenport-Hines, ‘but it strikes me that his mind is increasingly hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield standing in a London garden, with a line of washing hanging behind them like a white flag of truce or surrender); Lawrence’s severed friendship with Bertrand Russell; the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; the dim years (1916-17) in Cornwall, when the Lawrences were being investigated by government authorities as possible German ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”

“... 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 disappearance ...”

“... like Solly Zuckerman tell us how it was for them, and perceptive novelists such as Nigel Balchin, William Cooper and C.P. Snow expose much that is true in the guise of fiction. Drawing upon a variety of sources – reports of Royal Commissions, obiter dicta of scientific notables, newspaper editorials etc – Dr Gummett gives us the first ...”

“... his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their elbows in New York. William Faulkner was never out of there. Always at night. Always drunk. But one morning even Cerf got fed up with the brewery toxins in the office hum. He took back the key. Another of Cerf’s specials, Truman Capote, a young goldfish new-swimming into the ...”

“... who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s 36-page notebook containing his theories on fossils, astronomy and much else, was kept, during ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... of his actions and it could be argued that a jury is better equipped than an Oxbridge-educated white male, however venerable, to make an accurate assessment of such circumstances. The Government seems to think juries are so cerebrally challenged that they constantly acquit when they should be convicting, but a Bar Council analysis of Serious Fraud Office ...”

“... 1980s, long before many of the other groups represented at Genoa were formed. The Tute Bianche (‘white overalls’) are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon, committed to the deconstruction of the opposition between violence and non-violence, but they, too, have roots in the autonomist movements of the 1970s. Demonstrations of this kind ...”

“... the unity of the English Church). Spenser belonged, as Shakespeare did, to the period in which William Camden was at work providing etymologies for many names, and that is part of the reason he was so alive to the resources and buried senses of nomenclature. Writers in the 19th and 20th centuries could scour newspapers (and in Dickens’s case council ...”

“... Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin Concerto under the composer’s direction, not to worry about rehearsing – he was off to the ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”