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“... poetry and belief, at the time of Empson’s return from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to ...”

“... has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added ...”

“... Harvard law school professor Archibald Cox. It was picked up in 1978 by the conservative Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s first plenary encounter with affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell, in a pivotal decision, embraced the diversity rationale while rejecting all other justifications for racial ...”

“... and generosity (he wanted to make a magazine where he himself, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis could appear regularly – an annexe to the Vortex – but was determined to accept anything that had quality). Much of the detail lacks interest, however, and it is hard to avoid the ungrateful reflection that, since the fine detail is largely of concern ...”

“... Belloc, Blunden, Bridges, Edith Sitwell, Graves, Sassoon, Meynell, W.J. Turner, Phillpotts, Day Lewis, Auden – to a tyro like myself, it did at times seem everyone – for the series of Benn’s ‘Sixpenny Poets’ which he edited. (In 1944, though I did not know it then, he was editing the poems of Nancy Cunard, with whom I was working at the ...”

“... he is attempting to heal old wounds and soften his ‘stern age’ into peace. Similarly, C. Day Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (1952) might be regarded as a shrewd strategy by an establishment operator who hoped one day to succeed Masefield as Poet Laureate. More charitably, it could be argued that Day Lewis’s ...”

“... called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale,’ he wrote in his brilliant book on Thomas Aquinas. In fact – and this is what makes Chesterton so much more delightful a writer than Belloc – everything he wrote was ‘subjective’, everything in his prose, whether it is the poetry of Browning which is being considered or the intellectual ...”

“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years ...”

“... forgotten Victorian photographer called Francis Hetling. His photographs, somewhat in the style of Lewis Carroll, gave a feeling of everyday life in the 19th century. It was decided to rescue him from obscurity with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1974. All was going well until a visitor to the show noticed that the child in one of the ...”

“... with dreadful truth, ‘He believes in himself.’ This is probably closer to Poe than to Thomas à Kempis, but it’s a wonderful passage and it allows us to find elsewhere what Chesterton found in Christianity. Truth is stranger than fiction, he says in Heretics, ‘for we have made fiction to suit ourselves’. William Oddie’s book is a ...”

“... in London, no goods were to be sold after Vespers (around 6 p.m.), marked by the bell of St Thomas the Martyr of Acon; Compline, struck on the bells of St Martin’s Le Grand, marked the closure of the taverns and the city curfew.Devotional attention to time encouraged the development of devices to measure it. The most ubiquitous instrument was the ...”

“... In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred ...”

“... Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to which Sidney had belonged and in whose cause he became a martyr. Poets wrote elegies which answered to ...”

“... found no patron in Paris. He eventually found one in 1883 back in Philadelphia, where the painter Thomas Eakins had already been impressed and influenced by Muybridge’s work and was using photographic studies for his own pictures. There, the University of Pennsylvania would sponsor his next motion studies, now concentrating on men and women. Sometime in the ...”