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“... Judged by European standards, the role of intellectuals in the history of the British Labour movement has not been especially distinguished. There are no figures in British Labour history of the stature of Jean Jaurès, Karl Kautsky or Antonio Gramsci, whose theoretical and historical works have been recognised as significant contributions to socialist politics ...”

“... One of Antonio Gramsci’s most compelling distinctions is between two kinds of political struggle. What he variously called the ‘war of manoeuvre’ or the ‘war of movement’ entailed the seizure of state power. This is not a problematic concept, and has as its clear model the Bolshevik experience. Understandably, in the inter-war years, this was the destination of Communist politics, but under the harsh circumstances of Fascist rule, it could only have been the ultima ratio, and not the prima ratio, of political action ...”

“... can hope to reach a substantial ‘general’ readership: the Evans and Pogge von Strandmann, Winter and De Groot books each have this audience in mind. The subject also attracts many non-academic writers, editors and compilers, contributing a large literature of ‘popular history’. The war has stimulated some of the most impressive work within these ...”

“... national asset. The same was true of Britain during the Great War, as may be discovered from Jay Winter’s superb scholarly analysis. The subject-matter is more specialised than his title suggests. This is a socio-economic historian’s investigation of the impact of war on population trends and civilian health, with an epilogue, which reads a bit like the ...”

“... the poetry, the wild blood had been transferred across the Atlantic Ocean to this cold winter land, to this, his father’s harsh native city in which he now lay dying. He looked at his father’s face and wished that those features were his own.’ Much of Davie’s spirited salute to Waverley (’one of the greatest novels in the ...”

“... in ‘the smallest snowstorm on record’ – ‘Have you ever tried to find two snowflakes on a winter landscape that’s been covered with snow for months?’ These two flakes aren’t in fact found and preserved in the freezer – ‘where they would be comfortable’ – but they’re preserved in Brautigan’s art. Perhaps this miniature art has ...”

“... At that time of year the cattle on my father’s beef farm in Yorkshire come inside for the winter, and we had recently separated a group of young bullocks from the rest of the herd. The bullocks went into a barn and the others were supposed to stay out for a few more days, but they didn’t like it, and expressed their dislike loudly. We had to move ...”

“... moments, your fingers die; at its edge, the 5.5 million square mile ice-cap (twice that size in winter) calves bergs, some as big as London, the largest recorded 60 miles long, which drift through the most turbulent seas in the world; no land-based vertebrate inhabits the southernmost continent, because nothing can live on it apart from breeding penguins ...”

“... and government, and could impersonate the spring song of birds (‘And sing with us, Away, Winter away!/Cum, Somer, cum, the suete sesoùn and sonne!’). Meghan Markle, an actress down to her opalescent toenails, can do all this stuff standing on her head, especially the speaking with the dead bit. She has an instinct for posterity (all actors do) and ...”

“... Lofty Things’: Augusta Gregory seated at her great ormolu table, Her eightieth winter approaching: ‘Yesterday he threatened my life. I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table, The blinds drawn up.’ Her only son, Robert, killed in 1918 on the Italian front when a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, was ...”

“... of the moon), but with pages of responsible and fascinating teasing-out:   For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!And overspread with phantom light,(With swimming phantom light o’erspreadBut rimmed and circled by a silver thread)I see the old Moon in her lap, foretellingThe coming-on of rain and squally blastAs for Eliot, there are evocations, as persuasive ...”

“... The presiding author is Homer, who comes from a land where lemon trees bloom. Book 2 is a winter book. It covers 15 months, from October to December of the following year, and changes mood dramatically. There are only a few short letters written in the summer months, as if Werther can’t write at any length until we get to early autumn: ‘As nature ...”

“... showing as the ranking literary man, publishing The North Ship (1945), Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) before he was 26. Amis seems to have taken this in his stride, being more absorbed by the many sexual opportunities that came his way even as a junior academic. Larkin got on well with Amis’s first wife, Hilly Bardwell, and Bradford wonders how ...”

“... removed. He convalesced by lying on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal over the summer. In the winter of 1956 a small collection was produced by the literary quarterly Nimbus after Macmillan had rejected it. He spent part of 1957 in New York, and after that had a burst of lyric energy which produced a series of love poems, kinder and happier in tone than ...”

“... had started going to Greece in about 1959 and soon bought a house in Athens, where he lived every winter for years. It is to Greece that many of the poems in this book and in later collections owe their settings, their characters and their very un-American blend of refined sensuality and sense of the divine inhabiting the human, of the god breathing through ...”