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“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... out, has done this with particular fervency, and nowhere more so than in Oxford. When Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek from 1960 until 1989, published a collection of essays on the history of his discipline, he called it Blood for the Ghosts, referring not only to the necromantic scene in Homer’s Odyssey but also to a celebrated speech on Greek ...”

“... his point with a quotation from the philosopher John Dewey (one of several Americans, from William James to Emerson, whom Bromwich has found useful), making a distinction between vicious abstractions and liberating abstractions. Bromwich continues: Hazlitt supposed that nothing is by its nature either abstract or concrete. Our counting it as one or the other ...”

“... be merely Satanic, in the spirit of Conrad’s melodramatic characters, like Gentleman Brown or Mr Jones. Pinkie is strictly for the book. When the famous record to which the heart-broken Rose listens has stopped playing, he vanishes into limbo. Greene was less than ingenuous when he commented, in the second instalment of his autobiography, Ways of ...”

“... with silver globes, goldfish in miniature grottoes and flowers in Grecian urns. As Elizabeth Jones writes in ‘Keats in the Suburbs’,* the genius of this style of gardening was the great horticulturalist John Claudius Loudoun (a road in St John’s Wood is named after him), who in 1838 published his Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion. Loudoun’s ...”

“... to women. The First World War offered a way out of her violent and miserable first marriage to James Marr and she came to London with her young son to take up a position at the Ministry of Munitions, responsible for women’s welfare in the department of aircraft manufacture. After the war she changed her surname to Spry, implying that she was married to ...”

“... and Robert Adamson, with their studies of Newhaven fisherfolk, the rather less gifted Rev. Calvert Jones, the Frenchman Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who, though trained in chemistry, had to learn the elements of photography from a Lille chemist said to have worked with Talbot. From here, the process continued to spread: to Charles Marville, to Eugène ...”

“... the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp. He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the ...”

“... but only in passing, and only because of the fascination with it of such Hollywood stars as James Dean and Steve McQueen. Racing appears the most absurd outgrowth of our fascination with the car: drivers hurtle around in circles, at the limits of adhesion. Some lose control and end up dead, mutilated or crippled. And yet it’s one of the most ...”

“... plus a smattering of tourists had much good to say about Britain’s capital. Literary folk like James and Conrad slipped into the illusionary language of the dark sublime. London was dismal, blackened, sick, cruel and unplanned, concurred the charitable and the analytic; the sooner the authorities could draw the working population and their smokestacks out ...”

“... at once be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words may become deeds. In Philology James Turner attempts a heroic defence of this misunderstood breed. He argues that philology lies at the heart of all the academic disciplines currently called ‘humanities’. He suggests that subjects as apparently diverse as ...”

“... threw the beauty of his features into higher relief, freed at last from their conventional Burne-Jones frame. The first good things he wrote were a story in Les Aventures singulières and a short novel, Voyage avec deux enfants, both published in 1982, the same year he brought out the pornographic Les Chiens. The last story in Les Aventures singulières is ...”

“... gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the ...”

“... elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin Books’ reissue of Boris Ford’s Pelican ...”