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“... with which it engages, to become an active component in much modern critical thinking. From George Saintsbury through I.A. Richards to Kenneth Burke, it has exercised the active stimulus, not of a privileged book, but of one which in each generation earns afresh its own authority. For all its oddities – and certainly it is the oddest volume ever ...”

“... An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past ...”

“... had come to them in this way. You could tell which they were simply by looking at them, Surgeon Hutchinson of the Patna asylum wrote in 1869: the bhang drinkers had ‘a peculiarly leery look which, when once seen is unmistakable’. Other ill-effects attributed to the drug were indolence, violent excitement (different constitutions obviously reacted ...”

“... to write about the dead. Of the Provosts, I find the most interesting, not Mahaffy, but George Salmon (1888-1904). McDowell and Webb write splendidly, with great narrative verve and far more wit than I thought their subject would provoke, but they are particularly lively on Salmon and on Humphrey Lloyd (1867-1881). There are a few pointless ...”

“... thinking which found ultimate expression in Aristotle and Plato. It would be ridiculous to say George Thomson’s ideas are refuted, or even contested, by such an argument (and he is unmentioned in the book’s bibliography). But the turn of thought is characteristic of An Unfinished History. Its writer emerges from his thickets of trivia only to muse like ...”

“... Naming of Places’. In the second of the group, ‘To Joanna’, Wordsworth has allowed Joanna Hutchinson a joke against his nature-loving circle, Who look upon the hills with tenderness, And make dear friendships with the streams and groves. But Mason really doesn’t care for ‘a coterie keen on pathetic fallacy’, and a touch of self-satire on ...”

“... authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was stymied from the outset by ...”

“... in particular, the indifference that greeted Blunden’s selection in 1954, published by Hutchinson, and also Leonard Clark’s Chatto selection of 1973, for which Clark himself put up some of the money. It’s true that Blunden, thinking his own poems didn’t fit the fashions of the early Fifties, tried to second-guess the reviewers by making an ...”

“... Cambridge University Press; a second book on the rise of the wage-earner was contracted in 1954 to Hutchinson but rejected after submission. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Hobsbawm would apply for posts at Cambridge and Oxford but never secure one. He would go on to spend almost forty years at Birkbeck, the University of London’s college for mature ...”

“... seems never to have flagged. He had other friendships – for example, with Brigid Patmore, Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Schiff, people less involved in the literary struggle, and perhaps for that reason recipients of some of his most interesting letters. All in all, he seems to have made himself as much at home as it was in his nature to be. Yet the letters ...”

“... before leaving for the church – is strange enough. Barker also gives Mary’s sister, Sara Hutchinson, usually renowned only for being the object of Coleridge’s obsessive attentions, room to breathe and speak. After a stay at Rydal Mount in 1816, Henry Crabb Robinson told Mary Lamb that ‘he never saw a man so happy in three wives as Mr ...”

“... garden, but she is much nearer the water. Not sure how common grey wagtails are, I knock on Timmy Hutchinson (Timmy the Twitcher)’s door to tell him so that he can put them in his bird column in the village bulletin.10 July. A programme currently said to be unexpectedly popular is Love Island, which is similar in format to Big Brother in that a dozen or so ...”