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“... not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new transgressive criticism’ produced by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked ...”

“... a 20th-century construction, put forward especially strongly in the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army ...”

“... letter ever written by an English author about his work’. Tracing the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the dipsomaniac British consul in Mexico, as he grapples with and succumbs to his mescal addiction, Under the Volcano is not only a baroque study of terminal delirium but a tormented, brilliant and often grimly comic appreciation of the human ...”

“... others to do the same. When in 1810 her daughter-in-law was in the midst of a dalliance with Sir Geoffrey Webster, Lady Holland’s son, Lady Melbourne told Caroline that her behaviour the previous night had been ‘disgraceful in its appearances and . . . disgusting in its motives’. That may seem pretty rich coming from her. But she was complaining not ...”

“... while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with over four times Britain’s population, manages with 435 Congressmen. That number never goes up because Congressmen have real power and even a few ...”

“... The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it mitigates the worst effects of their being bad. This brings us to the main uses of power in the classical liberal or, in Robert Nozick’s phrase, the ...”

“... into hers. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf says what Light says of her and more. Clarissa Dalloway at her best is a modern Julia Stephen, poised at the head of a household, knowing as she pauses on the landing ‘the very temper of her house!’ The sounds that maddened Woolf in real life – ‘the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door ...”

“... the skimpy wine, & the very nice sensible conversation’ left Virginia Woolf cold but where, as Geoffrey Grigson remembered, one might bump into Braque … or Jean Hélion from Paris, or Eliot gayer than his reputation, actually singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’. The exodus from Hitler’s Reich having begun, one might walk into the solemn dignified ...”

“... has two words, Geist and Witz. In the English translation of De l’esprit ‘spirit’ is the best choice, of course, since it captures better the philosophical ambiguity that Derrida is exploiting. So when Derrida says that ‘no one ever speaks of esprit in Heidegger,’ he might also seem to be right if esprit were translated as ‘wit’. He would ...”

“... the religious life of England. That damning appraisal was most clearly set out in the late Geoffrey Dickens’s The English Reformation (1964), which dominated the historiography for thirty years. Dickens distilled his overwhelmingly negative picture into the claim that the Marian regime, bedevilled by an ‘arid legalism’, had ‘failed to discover ...”

“... crisis. Corbyn usually comes after ‘Don’t Know’ when the public is asked who will make the best prime minister: at the end of April one poll had Theresa May on 61 per cent (higher than Thatcher in 1983 and Blair in 2001) and Corbyn on 26 per cent. It also had the Tories on 49 per cent for voting intention and Labour on 23 per cent. Figures of this sort ...”

“... Boxley Abbey in 1538 at the time of the monastery’s dissolution. The removal was carried out by Geoffrey Chamber, an agent of Thomas Cromwell, who reported to his master that he had plucked down the Rood, ‘which has been had in great veneration’, only to find ‘certain engines and old wire, with old rotten sticks in the back of the same which caused ...”

“... further concessions. It believes that Brexit has put the Union itself in jeopardy, giving it the best chance it has had in a generation to achieve its main political goal of Irish unification. It is not a good time for Unionist politicians to be digging in their heels over secondary issues like legislation on the Irish language. But the DUP’s role as ...”

“... who represented swashbuckling capitalism; Keith Joseph, who represented high-minded anti-statism; Geoffrey Howe, who represented disciplined proto-monetarism. But she saw them all off easily. In this she was greatly helped by their obvious lack of leadership qualities. Du Cann was cavalier and untrustworthy; Joseph was flaky and depressive; Howe was deadly ...”

“... and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly ...”