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“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources ...”

“... accident and lost his right arm.’ In a story called ‘A Game of Chess’ (1965), two brothers, Hugh and Amos, meet for dinner in Chicago. Amos, too, has lost an arm: ‘His left arm, ending in a gloved hand, hung motionless at his side. He had lost his arm as the result of an accident with a shotgun.’ He draws again and again on the same store of ...”

“... a filter of experience. Consoling Crosland over the loss of his seat in 1955, the ex-Chancellor Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as ...”

“... British radicals for two centuries – from Paine to Cobden, from Bertrand Russell to Tony Benn. Hugh Cunningham’s The Volunteer Force (1975) clearly revealed the Mid-Victorian popularity of mobilising in national self-defence, and if modern British social historians had been less sympathetic to the Left, or if Conservative historians had been less ...”

“... made the more premature by undiagnosed diabetes: Anthony Powell (who used Lambert as a model for Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time), William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van ...”

“... at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh Trevor-Roper has compared, in his vivid re-creation of its effect upon the generation which lived through it, to the 1930s. In politics, Arminianism was essentially a 1620s issue. It remained politically inflammatory in the 1630s, but by then Laud’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 ...”

“... order had been restored. Nemesis had followed hubris; crime had received its just punishment. Thomas Mann said it, too: everything must be paid for. Expressions of self-pity were rare. Even before 1945, there were rumblings of guilt. ‘Ja, wir tragen unser Leiden mit Geduld, an der ganzen Scheisse sind wir selber schuld,’ people sang under their ...”

“... sister Everina and her delicate friend Fanny Blood as well, whose marriage to her dilatory suitor Hugh Skeys Wollstonecraft meanwhile actively promoted in the expectation that Skeys would take Fanny to live in Portugal, a climate she hoped might restore her friend to health. Two years later the married Fanny sent word from Lisbon that she was about to have a ...”

“... They sneer at ‘fellows with ideas’ or tell funny stories about Americans or admire Jimmy Thomas. It is all very painful and explains why so many of the young scientists here turn communist. Postan was astonished to find that the medievalists ignored the work of Marc Bloch and none of the lectures on political thought mentioned Marx. Brooke explains ...”

“... Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”

“... illusion, but still ... Here is an account of mama’s supposed mariage blanc to the rich footler Hugh (‘Hughdie’) Auchinloss:I should note that the only advantage for a child in having an alcoholic parent is that you acquire, prematurely, quite a bit of valuable data. Apparently, there was going to be Sex whether Nina liked it or not. She did not like ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”