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“... Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the ...”

“... the first, a series of brief, stunningly incisive discussions of intellectuals, from Julien Benda, Thomas Mann, Eliot and Woolf through Orwell, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, Mulhern sketches the collective portrait of what he calls ‘Kulturkritik’. He is not blind to Kulturkritik’s virtues, but more interested in what’s wrong with it ...”

“... of France. A good many English captains made considerable names for themselves in France under Edward III and the Black Prince, and independently on their own account: Robert Knowles and Hugh Calverley for instance. But none achieved quite such fame or rose quite so high as Sir John Hawkwood, the ‘diabolical Englishman’ of Stonor Saunders’s book, did ...”

“... while less visible property could be discovered by asking ‘divers the neighbours of the said Thomas Grene what the said Thomas Grene is worth’. The system of circulating credit generated its own information about property. The witness who said John Tanner couldn’t ‘levye xx s’ claimed to know that because he ...”

“... disrupted; but he also believed that new equilibria would establish themselves in due course. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798) had argued that human populations carry on growing until their needs exceed the supply of sustenance; and when Darwin read it in 1838 he extended the principle to all forms of ...”

“... but religious tensions were also a frequent trigger. In the 1860s the High Church principles of Thomas Keble (brother of John Keble, a leading figure in the Tractarian movement) became unpopular in his Gloucestershire parish, producing resentment that might have exacerbated opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... This persona, also called the Romantic Robin, was created early in the 19th century by Keats, Thomas Love Peacock and, above all, Scott, whose Ivanhoe not only features the character of Locksley (Robin Hood) but bases its plot on what Knight calls ‘a displaced Robin Hood story’. The fourth category is Robin on stage or in film. But the apparent ...”

“... The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall ...”

“... by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad Bomber: He’s symmetrically built … neither fat nor skinny … a co-operative worker ...”

“... the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally gone mad, and former disciples such as Matthew Arnold denounced him as frankly dangerous, a ‘moral desperado’. Some of the mud stuck. It was soon apparent that he was unwholesomely fascinated by Blood and Iron. In ...”

“... anatomically perplexing ‘The wicked backslide from the very womb’ (58). But fortunately, as Edward Dahlberg once remarked, ‘there are many psalms that even the droning of a priest cannot kill.’ As one reads along, the suspicion grows that perhaps this book is not about the poetry at all, but about the commentary. Usually half, and sometimes more, of ...”

“... poem, called ‘Rat Week’, in which he attacked the court sycophants who had encouraged Edward VIII’s affair with Wallis Simpson. Invitations to Windsor and Balmoral followed, and he was overjoyed. Ziegler, as biographer of Edward VIII, takes a detailed interest in this side of Osbert’s life, recording its ...”

“... novelists rested comfortably in the routines that had brought them success in the past, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) was always committed to experimentation. He was his own pitiless taskmaster, working for money as strenuously as a starveling, and received £30,000 from Routledge for a 15-year option on his novels. He wrote successful silver-fork ...”

“... of secrets, whispers, unanswered telephones, Anne Frank’s house, Albert Schweitzer’s music, Edward Lear as ‘dream companion’. These are the kind of poems a good poet would write if his ‘one idea’ for the moment were that everything in the world wants to be a message. Rain in London wants to ‘whisper’. A shaken duster waves ...”