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“... and, with the Black Prince given a terminal prognosis, bracing itself for the first childhood of Richard II. It was embroiled in complex international relations, a collective if not effectively corporate regime dominated by Edward’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. McFarlane’s account is one that Evans, the theologian, cannot hope to match. It was wartime, a ...”

“... in the survivors shrinks daily. It would be easy enough to prolong this lament, but the truth may be that things aren’t as bad as all that. They can be changed if there is a mind, as there is money, to change them. The new journal Vanity Fair has just reappeared after months of preliminary publicity and the expenditure of very large amounts of cash. It ...”

“... assumed before reaching a resolve from which nothing could shake him, I heard him say: ‘This may be the most foolish idea I have ever had, but I think that I should like to have on my headquarters someone who could talk about Proust.’ I joined the Headquarters at Hythe, and shortly afterwards, we moved to Battle Abbey, which in peacetime was a ...”

“... In a striking passage in his memoirs Richard Baxter recalls watching the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the Parliament. After some fierce fighting, panic suddenly set in among the Royalists on the opposite hill. Standing next to Baxter was the godly Major Thomas Harrison. As the Cavaliers broke and fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture ...”

“... that one can’t hope to tell the truth in an autobiography, that the very desire to write one may be proof of an incapacity to do so veraciously. In any case there is likely to be a conflict between the writer’s wish to make sense of his or her life, and the need to cut, however modestly, a figure of interest to readers. Only people stupid and ...”

“... smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.’ It may be that Macfarlane overestimates how far a linguistic effort can alter habits, which are driven by forces such as the market in computer games, the depersonalising of language which accompanied the new power of the civil service after the Civil War and the ...”

“... restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that ...”

“... two positions produce an antinomy or aporia, not the potentially productive contradiction that may lead us to a higher plane of understanding and a more effective way of acting. As such, they reflect or express the current dilemmas of a late capitalist, liberal democratic society in which we can’t make up our minds whether we actively create the social ...”

“... have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish Complex (1977 – the translation by Richard Lourie in 1982), the first of Konwicki’s books to be banned by the authorities in Poland; later on, he graduated to being banned by the Underground. Its basic situation is less extreme than that of A Minor Apocalypse, but just as dramatic and ...”

“... Pound’s own life story, the text needs to be glossed in order to be read at all. The annotation Richard Sieburth has provided is ample without being fussy, and his introductory essay offers an informative account of the sequence’s genesis, themes, methods and critical reception (not least from the judges who awarded it the prestigious Bollingen Prize, in ...”

“... Biographia Literaria, which he subtitled Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Richard Holmes, by reputation anyway, is different; and certainly his magnificent life of Shelley makes time, in the course of unravelling the threads of Shelley’s emotional, intellectual and imaginative life, to introduce its readers to writings that most of ...”

“... Nothing untoward has so far happened in Venezuela, although we do not, of course, know what plans may be under consideration in the deeper recesses of Washington. At any rate, now that the Cold War has ended the Americans can no longer denounce their critics to the South as the puppets of Moscow. The gadarene rush from the countryside to Caracas in the ...”

“... R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any ...”

“... in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started ...”

“... elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with ...”