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“... stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of Commons. Nicolson also married well, and when Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, died, a handsome legacy came their ...”

“... minister. In the real world, there is only one possible way – and it is only ‘possible’ at best – of removing Mrs Thatcher from office. It is to nail her very specifically as a sustained deceiver. Hurling generalised abuse is no earthly use: she thrives on it. Abuse simply plays into the hands of those who promote her image. The first set of ...”

“... Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had ...”

“... rich store of newly published texts and variants, many of them representing his first and arguably best thoughts; deconstructionists have homed in on the paradox of a poetic mission which aims to realise the ‘sad incompetence of human speech’, while both deconstruction and psychoanalysis have been attuned to Wordsworth’s sense that crucial human insights ...”

“... published ten plays: some bombed, but three remained stockpieces throughout the 19th century. The best of these, Money (1840), was revived last June at the Olivier Theatre, where it seemed a curious hybrid of Restoration comedy and Victorian meliorism. In addition to literary work that would have exhausted many people, Bulwer-Lytton sat in the House of ...”

“... and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of course, been far from Marsh’s intention to produce any such ...”

“... the fortunate knack of combining fidelity to the author with entertainment for the reader. At his best, he succeeds in distilling opaque empiricism into limpid aphorism. Occasionally, however, an author might justifiably complain that his sophisticated arguments are simply being guyed in the process of vulgarisation, and that the chief pleasure is no longer ...”

“... to the Commonwealth. He adds: ‘Those who brought the gift to these countries were the second-best, for naturally the best stayed at home.’ Kent tells a story about Sir Granville Ram, first Parliamentary Counsel and as English as Cornwall. A young Hindu on secondment to the London Office ingenuously inquired if Ram ...”

“... Not everyone​ likes Geoffrey Hill. There have been tedious arguments about his ‘difficulty’, about whether that difficulty has become hermetic obscurity in his later work, about his politics, and about whether the large quantity of verse he’s written in his sixties, seventies and eighties is as good as the relatively small number of poems he wrote in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s ...”

“... stand by and wring its hands, as it does with each new atrocity in the utterances on radio and TV. Geoffrey Hill’s poetry has made something of a speciality in distrusting language in this way; inventing, as it were, a precise and searching idiom of distrust. But the real poet of these horrors, Paul Celan, had no such distrust. His vision of them is wholly ...”

“... the unnamable’s familiarity. ‘Emotion anticipated in tranquillity’. So it was that Geoffrey Madan distilled his obituary-on-phial. ‘In the words of an obituary notice, intended for the Times but never sent: “A genius for friendship with all and sundry, infectious enthusiasm, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love ...”

“... Britain and to stress the slowness of its growth gain his approval. Not surprisingly perhaps. The best way, after all, of denying a decline is to minimise the original rise. Yet, as Professor Patrick O’Brien points out in one of the essays in a very valuable collection, the rate of industrialisation in Britain was ‘unprecedented’ and was perceived as ...”

“... of influence, but baseball, too, has spread around the globe. In an essay in the latest edition, Geoffrey Nunberg notes that ‘it is rare to find a single page of an English-language novel or newspaper that does not reveal what nation it was written in,’ and although the Norton does not include a single text from its own country of publication – unless ...”

“... come to their own conclusion about how they do their depending on the people they need. So despite Geoffrey Hill’s misgivings about Eliot, reported in some detail in this book (Hill has talked about ‘the progressive deterioration of Eliot’s creative gifts’ in his later poetry), Ricks is determined, in the name of true friendship, that Eliot must not be ...”

“... it was in its supposed heyday, critics were known mostly for the ferocity of their prejudices. Geoffrey Hartman, though, has never been a critic with animus. He has been forceful in his views without being disparaging of others in a profession with few niches and great rivalries. He has gone on making an exemplary case for close reading and the value of ...”