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“... king’s presumed supremacy of the Church, his divorce and the Boleyn marriage. Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusian monks whom Henry had executed were now cast as religious martyrs. Henry himself, worse than Nero, was guilty of incest and adultery, and heading straight to hell. Pole’s manuscript was suffused with a sense of his own aristocratic ...”

“... Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The ...”

“... how we got here, Srnicek and Williams – like so many recent writers, from Owen Jones to Mark Fisher to Philip Mirowski – lay great stress on the think-tanks (the Mont Pelerin Society and the like) that had their solutions ready when Keynesianism faltered in the mid-1970s. The ‘folk politics’ of Climate ...”

“... Margaret would be Regent until Charles turned 18. As amended, it would now provide for Prince Philip to fill the slot. It was a clear demotion. The yellow press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But ...”

“... and often I wished for less, wanted more birds, fewer words. The antecedent of Birdscapes is James Fisher’s still unsurpassed Shell Bird Book of 1966. Fisher seemed to know all there was to know about birds and had much to tell us on subjects ranging from the fossil avifauna of Britain to John Clare’s poetic bird ...”

“... in the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, Henry joined forces with his new allies, Charles VI of France and Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, to send envoys to the crusader king of Poland, the Byzantine emperor and the Ottoman sultan. The exact purpose of the mission is unclear: the emperor was told of the kings’ hope that Rome and Constantinople could be ...”

“... 1960s was his campaign against Stuart Montgomery. Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press had published Roy Fisher, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan and Lee Harwood, and seemed poised to become the publisher the British Poetry Revival of those years needed to counterbalance the waning radical commitments of the post-Eliot Faber list. Reprinting Finlay’s 1960 volume ...”

“... altogether, is at the heart of Modernism. The pre-modern in Eliot’s poetry is a matter of Fisher Kings and fertility cults; in his prose it is a question of classical order, Tory traditionalism and the Christian church. In both cases, however, a discredited individualism must yield to a more corporate form of being, roughly at the time when ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... the indispensable Eisenhowerist who naturally writes of the WSC-Eisenhower relationship, to Philip Ziegler, the tactful Mountbatten biographer who does for WSC and the monarchy, the contributors cover almost every imaginable WSC facet and interface, sometimes with considerable factual detail. The late D.J. Wenden provides chapter and verse and lots of ...”

“... he wrote two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.The attraction of the slip is ...”

“... the interplay between a bourgeois hanging on to an ageing modernity and the counter-culture,’ Philip Mann writes in The Dandy At Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the 20th Century (2017), ‘that makes the 1970s.’As Kraftwerk developed their new, distinctive sound, they also evinced a talent for supplying quotes of the sort that on-the-make young music ...”

“... responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care about.’Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held republicanism, though ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ ’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one ...”

“... team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were Michael Hill, Paul Purnell and Philip Havers (Sir Michael’s son). The three juniors at a later point signed a note listing, among others, Conlon’s alibi witnesses. They included Burke’s name on the list. However, a separate list later made available to the defence unaccountably omitted ...”