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“... articles of Jonathan Israel, nor even the 1976 book of Gonzalo de Raparaz, but an article of Lewis Hanke published in 1961 and another by Raparaz from 1967. But there are not many areas in which Civilisation Matérielle is out of date. On the contrary, a considerable part of the work rests upon as yet unpublished research. Braudel has long been an ...”

“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... One was picturesque and picaresque, Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes, published by Geoffrey Gorer in 1935 when he was 30, after a rather Waugh-like tour of French and British territories: he had been guided by Féral Benga, a ballet dancer from Senegal whom he had met in Paris. The striking pictures included a smoky painting of handsome Benga ...”

“... therefore, his Penguin Book of Light Verse is less wholly pleasurable, even less admirable, than Geoffrey Grigson’s now nearly ten-years-old but newly reprinted Unrespectable Verse, then part of the reason may be (given that the two volumes share a number of poems) that Grigson has had either the wisdom or the good fortune not to get saddled with a ...”

“... Spirit of Anti-Pathos’, which connects with sparkling audacity Brecht, Gramsci, Wyndham Lewis, and the Wallace Stevens who wrote ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three ...”

“... Certainly not the saddest for historians, according to Geoffrey Hawthorn’s wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical standing of counter-factuals – hypothetical ‘other worlds’ – and their usefulness for historians and social scientists ...”

“... reclaim the African and Asian colonies lost after the Great War, he was silenced by the historian Lewis Namier with the words: ‘Wir Juden und die anderen Farbigen denken anders.’ Some Zionists tried to persuade themselves that they counted among Namier’s ‘other coloured peoples’, or even that Zionism was an anti-colonial movement. The indefatigable ...”

“... When Sir Lewis Namier was lying on his death-bed, he is said to have looked up radiantly at his wife and declared: ‘What a pity! Yesterday was the first time I saw in my mind’s eye the Survey of Parliament as a whole.’ A pity indeed, for the insight allegedly offered to Namier on the point of death has never quite been afforded to any of his disciples and successors ...”

“... the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their methods of ...”

“... who knew the difference between right and wrong. Not even that Duke of Newcastle described by Sir Lewis Namier had more patronage at his disposal than Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed: and Sir Robert Walpole and his successors were vulnerable to visits from grandees, who called on him with the word that it was time for a change. As a friend of mine, a Conservative ...”

“... if not the glorification of the present’. There is a further near coincidence. In 1929, Lewis Namier began the patient deconstruction of England’s constitutional myths in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which jettisoned a grand narrative of statesmanship and party principle, and put in its place the microscopic study of ...”

“... imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A ...”

“... it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... come they are almost immortal?’, or to use Martianus Capella’s term, borrowed by C.S. Lewis, longaevi. Perhaps they weren’t human after all. Once again there was a hardline view: they were spirits, and since they weren’t angels they must be devils, which meant that those who believed in elf queens dancing in green meadows – in the words of a ...”