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“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”

“... our troubled times. Engels, however, has remained on the shelf. Is the moment ripe for a reunion? Tristram Hunt clearly thinks so. He has restored colour, lights and action to Engels’s life much as Francis Wheen did in his makeover of Marx ten years ago. The Frock-Coated Communist is highly readable and mostly reliable. Engels’s previous biographers ...”

“... that his success was due to innate genius, rather than an accident of birth or circumstance. Tristram Hunt steers clear of hagiography, arguing that Wedgwood’s achievements were predicated on Britain’s burgeoning status as a colonial and imperial power, a nexus of global trade and industry. But shades of Wedgwood the singular genius remain. In ...”

“... the New Labour anthem to replace the robust ‘Red Flag’, here we have it dusted down again by Tristram Hunt to front a passionate, kaleidoscopic but wilful defence of the Victorian city. Building Jerusalem is a book with a plain political line; yet where it leaves us is little clearer than in Blake’s poem. The subtitle offers the sharper clue to ...”

“... V&A’s Bags: Inside Out (reopening 17 May), bags get a desiccated write-up: a feeble foreword by Tristram Hunt, woolly captions, bland generalisations, brand worship. This doesn’t begin to do justice to the sometimes barmy bravura of what is on show. Emily Jo Gibbs’s horse chestnut bag (1996) The curator, Lucia Savi, has brought together items ...”

“... long civilisation would help Westerners ‘better understand’ the country. The V&A director, Tristram Hunt, stressed the significance of the show in the current political climate, saying that sanctions on Iran (which prevented the lending of many pieces from Tehran museums) and ‘militaristic language’ – presumably Trump’s threat to blow up ...”

“... if he is re-elected: that’s 270,000 new places in new schools. The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, remarked that this would mean more schools in places where they aren’t needed. He is missing the point: schools will lose out, but they won’t be free ...”

“... Tristram is the fashion,’ Laurence Sterne boasted, having just arrived in London in 1760 to taste the success of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. His glee seems understandable. This obscure Yorkshire clergyman, known as a wit only to a small circle of eccentric friends, had reached his mid-forties without achieving any kind of fame or affluence ...”

“... improvements in the early cantos, in copying them himself.) With Mary Shelley was staying Leigh Hunt, obsequious, resentful of Byron’s patronage, and, Skimpole-like, borrowing and squandering his money. Hunt was a terrible legacy from Shelley. His nagging wife hated Byron, would not speak Italian, and their children ...”

“... Queen Guenevere perhaps sprang initially from some of the same impulses that made Holman Hunt paint The Awakening Conscience, for the Queen’s face has a pensive look that may be remorse, and in the background is a second figure – seated, male, and so diminished that the viewer might easily overlook him – probably intended as Lancelot. But what ...”

“... book is full of grief and fear, as well as fun. Australia’s insects, to a mandible, are on the hunt for Clive James. Each chapter is a chapter of accidents. ‘Death, & Poverty, & Shame, & Pain’ – the list is that of the philosopher Hume – are all here. And so are some other ‘Calamities of Life’ which Hume would have been too shy to mention. In ...”

“... When male life expectancy is about forty, this is decline.’ Or about the reason Leigh and John Hunt described the Prince of Wales as ‘a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country’: Wilson explains in square brackets that George III had been on the throne since 1760 although the date of the ...”

“... of Westlake verse are invented to adorn the narrative – another Nabokovian touch. Clement’s hunt for Joseph coincides and precipitates a series of crises. He realises that he has powerful antagonisms – and that these were fully reciprocated by his dead brother. Clement’s wife Sheila is a best-selling writer of ‘sword and sorcery’ romances, under ...”

“... and, therefore, from access to the Tree of Life. No more low-hanging fruit: from then on we had to hunt, farm and cook. The Earth itself was injured by original sin: it became less fertile and its produce less nourishing, taking a toll on human longevity. The patriarchs were not immortal, but they were built to last. Methuselah was out in the nervous 900s, and ...”

“... taking interested notice of the English Quixotic tradition. Friends one day lent her Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which she found (though she never read it through, and was honest enough to say so) ‘a nice, inconsequential sort of book – the sort of book one would like to have written – or might even one day write’. In her novels Barbara Pym does aim ...”