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“... to illuminate their understanding of old familiar scenes. Among the professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the ...”

“... blamed him: he was not the kind of person who gets the blame. What he did get was a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford (the Warden kindly advised him to do some reading over the summer in preparation for his teaching), and another lady, Sylva Norman, whose literary ambitions he assisted. Teaching was as much a success in Oxford as it had been in Japan: he ...”

“... the 1951 film adaptation of Show Boat. When the sheriff arrives to arrest Steve Baker (played by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where ...”

“... Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... receptive to fundamentalist Christianity, and (if the recent Soviet invitation to televangelist Robert Schuller is anything to go by) the satellite channels of a united Europe may one day broadcast the gospel of individual salvation which its inhabitants have long thought fit only for their American cousins. It is worth remembering that the social evolution ...”

“... done,’ the wife and daughters think, ‘thank God they didn’t really know.’ A little later Merton Densher, the man Kate is in love with, asks her just what it is her father has been up to. ‘What has he done, if no one can name it?’ ‘He has done everything.’ ‘Oh – everything! Everything’s nothing.’ ‘Well then,’ said Kate, ‘he ...”

“... tedious and repetitive’, and if you find Shakespeare’s Sonnets a bit of a drag the former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford agrees that ‘though they are world famous, they may disappoint modern readers. Some of them consist largely of complicated wordplay, and scarcely engage our feelings at all.’ Equally, he is enthusiastic about ...”

“... evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s ...”

“... in the 15th century. And Scots were not popular in late medieval Oxford. Two fellows of Merton came up before the college authorities in 1497 after a fracas in which one had accused the other of being a Scot. The perpetrator, William Ireland, was warned not to issue such an infamy against anyone else. The ‘at Oxinfurde’ colophon may merely be a ...”

“... because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended Walter Pater. It was a world in which everybody seemed to know everybody: Lang’s friend Charlotte Green was the wife of the philosopher T.H. Green and the sister of John Addington Symonds, the historian of ...”

“... by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about ...”

“... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...”