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“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... love’ complete with ‘cheering beverage’ and ‘strong drink’, so he was not opposed (as Hardy and, later, Lovett probably were) to all mellowness in radical affairs. Was there not in Place’s emphasis on ‘respectability’ nevertheless something irrelevant and even inimical to the advance of the working class? And was there not a tradition more ...”

“... only thrive on big cities?’ It would not, of course, be a question meant to be taken seriously. Hardy, Gogol, Twain, Jane Austen, Synge, Hawthorne. But – it may as well be said at once – the adjective ‘great’ and its noun ‘greatness’ do occur too often in this otherwise wholly admirable book. Punches are pulled. Patent failures like the early ...”

“... led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign countries and foreign languages’, a judgment partly founded in the belief that Grey’s only Continental trip had amounted to two glum days in Paris.The ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by ...”

“... book has been published. We now have a better edition of poems which will appeal only to the most hardy among the faithful than we do of poems which readers attracted by the prose are quite likely to seek out. T.S. Eliot’s 1941 selection helped to revive Kipling’s reputation. Surely it would have made sense to include the best of the early verse in a new ...”

“... as a source of belief, or to restore an eloquence to politics – people who had grown up on Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Auden – Thomas was a fascinating phenomenon, a poet who wrote (some) utterly convincing poems from which no one could extract any kind of message. Either this was poetry as a new kind of consolation – without belief or ...”

“... awkward births in frostbitten fields. Still, it hasn’t quite got to the state of Dorset after Hardy, when the county started playing itself as depicted in the novels.4 February. Slightly wish I’d lightened my griping about arthritis with a reminiscence of my great-uncle Norris, included in an earlier memoir but no worse for that. Uncle Norris was, I ...”

“... It’s a moment that demands to be isolated as a short poem in prose, and is not unlike something Hardy, that master of prolepsis and superstition, might have invented. The next letter to Olwyn – short and bleak – is written later that month:On Monday morning, at about 6 a.m. Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral’s in Heptonstall next Monday.She asked me ...”

“... Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was hanged, drawn and quartered. We don’t know when Donne converted, or why. On Donne’s own account, he made his decision only after he had ‘to the measure of my poore ...”

“... underscored the depths of collaboration and anti-Semitism, Modiano portrayed the Occupation as, in Henry Rousso’s words, a ‘puzzle that must never be solved, for it is only through the gaps in the picture that the truth can emerge’. The brash, prosecutorial clarity of Ophüls was anathema to Modiano. Inevitably he attracted a number of admirers among ...”

“... J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come ...”

“... at a later date, tunic pockets. In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This sign was an ...”

“... Britain was published in 1951 to coincide with the Festival of Britain. Brandt travelled from Hardy’s Wessex to Dr Johnson’s Skye; from Coleridge’s Keswick to George Crabbe’s Aldeburgh; from Blake’s cottage at Felpham to Emily Brontë’s Haworth (David Hockney raised objections when he discovered that for this picture Brandt had spliced ...”